One of the largest domain name sales of the year was just reported by Uniregistry. The three letter Eko.com domain name was reportedly sold for $1,500,000 last week. Once this sale is archived by DNJournal and NameBio, it will rank as the third largest publicly reported domain name sale of the year. It is also the largest sale of the year via Uniregistry’s brokerage team, ahead of the $300,000 sale of Joyride.com earlier this year.
Towards the end of August of this year, Uniregistry reported the $92,000 sale of Skew.com. The sale was the largest publicly reported sale of the week in DNJournal. It is also the 44th largest sale of the year (to date). Skew.com was acquired by a cryptocurrency data analytics firm called Skew.
This morning, it was reported that Skew raised $2 million in a seed funding round with several investors, including Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins.
Brokering domain names can be a tough gig. Even when a prospective buyer is interested in a particular domain name, getting a deal closed can be challenging. A domain broker may send dozens of follow-up emails in order to get a buyer to agree to a deal or to induce a reasonable counter offer. It may even take a while to get a response from someone.
It is always neat to see how domain brokers handle follow-up emails with prospects. I think Uniregistry has a pretty neat system in place to enable its clients and brokers communicate with prospective buyers. From what I have seen working with various Uniregistry brokers on purchases, they seem to have their own creative ways to get a response.
For those who don’t follow my Twitter account, I want to share how the persistence of Uniregistry brokers paid off and concluded with a domain name sale. The sale was small ($1,500), but it was an unexpected sale that I entirely attribute to the diligence of Uniregistry, particularly Chris Aguilar. The domain name I sold (which will not be shared) was one I consider inventory and nothing special to me.
Have you ever really dived deep into the domain name registrar’s terms of service you agree to every time you register or transfer a domain name? If you are a Uniregistry registrant, there’s some humorous language about not being responsible for domain name issues related to zombie attacks that is hidden in plain sight in the company’s registration agreement.
Here’s an excerpt from the Uniregistry Registration Agreement, under section 2.20 Additional Terms:
I wrote about Uniregistry’s Domain Liquidity initiative last week. I shared that I like the idea of the program even though the exact details about how it will work are a bit sparse right now. I decided to try out Domain Liquidity to see how it works and share my results with you. The program is in its beta phase, and I think this has the potential to be a positive for domain investors.
I submitted a list of 208 domain names for review. (I posted the list in a screenshot below). There were a few one word .com domain names, a couple of .CO domain names, a couple of new gTLD domain names, and plenty of 2 and 3 word .com domain names. I wanted the list to be diverse to really get an idea of the types of domain names that were of interest and the offers for each of them. I don’t really want/need to sell inventory for wholesale prices right now, but I was open to sell if the offers were good enough, and also importantly, I would learn more about this initiative.
