Earlier this year, NamesCon announced that this would be the final conference at the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas. NamesCon organizers put out a survey asking attendees to share where they would like to see the NamesCon Global conference held in 2020.
This morning, NamesCon organizers announced that NamesCon 2020 will be held in Austin, Texas. The announcement was made and recorded in the opening session and shared via Twitter:
The Internet Commerce Association will be hosting or participating in several events and panels during the upcoming NamesCon conference in Las Vegas. Most notably, the ICA will host its annual dinner at the House of Blues restaurant, the B Side lounge at Mandalay Place. Tickets to the dinner are still available to purchase via EventBrite.
Here is a list of public events the ICA is either hosting or participating in during the conference, with the notable exception being the member meeting on Monday:
If you bought your ticket to NamesCon last year, the ticket prices were quite economical. If you waited until the last minute to try and buy a ticket, the price has gone up quite a bit. NamesCon will be held next week in Las Vegas, and the .ICU Registry announced a giveaway opportunity for two VIP NamesCon tickets:
Are you interested in #domains? Are you heading to @NamesCon next week? We have two #VIP tickets to give away! Visit https://t.co/Fk0T9uGtJb to play a game and try to win a FREE #NamesCon ticket! #domainname #domainer #nowiseeyou #icu #NamesConTicket #NamesConVIPTicket pic.twitter.com/f1tNQnCQYb
— doticu (@doticu) January 21, 2019
I will be at NamesCon in a week, but I am not really going for the panels or keynotes, with one exception. I am looking forward to hearing from GoDaddy VP and GM of the Aftermarket, Paul Nicks. You can watch Paul’s keynote from last year’s conference to understand why this is the one keynote speech I am planning in advance to attend.
With NamesCon being the largest domain industry conference and a conference sponsored by quite a few new gTLD operators, it is no surprise that NamesCon is utilizing several different domain names for different purposes. Here are some of the domain names that I can see NamesCon is using for different objectives:
Brent Oxley was the founder of HostGator, one of the world’s largest web hosting companies. Since selling HostGator, Brent has become an investor in high value domain names. From what I can tell, Brent primarily invests in exceptional one word .com domain names.
When NameJet revealed the list of domain names that will be up for auction in the NamesCon auction next month, I saw that Brent listed a large group of valuable domain names. I reached out to Brent to ask him what motivated him to list his domain names for sale via auction, and here’s what he told me:
“There’s a big difference between auctioning a domain with a reserve price and one without. All of the domains I listed have a minimum reserve price which means I can’t lose.
The auction will drum up a ton of exposure and could potentially bring in buyers that I haven’t been able to reach on my own.”
This is the first auction in which Brent has listed his domain names for sale. As he told me, in the best case scenario, he will sell inventory to net him millions of dollars, and in a worse case scenario, it’s an experiment that only costs him some time.
Here’s a list of Brent’s domain names that are up for sale in the auction:
