Shortly after the conclusion of the inaugural Heritage Auctions live domain auction, I learned that Dayton.com was sold by the auction house. Although HA did not share the sale price, the auction reserve price had been set at $50,000 plus the 15% buyer’s premium.
Based on the live auction result and the revised sale amount reported by HA’s Aron Meystedt, it appears that the sale price was close to the reserve price, but that is an unconfirmed guess.
The new registrant for Dayton.com is Marksmen, an IP and trademark firm that specializes in private domain name acquisitions, among other things. Although the Whois registrant information doesn’t give away any details about the buyer of the domain name, if you visit Dayton.com, you can see that it resolves to ActiveDayton.com, a website operated by the Dayton Daily News. I assume that means DDN acquired Dayton.com. I reached out to Cyntia King of Marksmen, but she was unable to comment on this.
Assuming it was the publication that bought the domain name, I don’t know if there are plans to rebrand its website to Dayton.com, or if it plans to operate a separate website on the Dayton.com domain name. Dayton Daily News also operates a separate website on DaytonDailyNews.com.
Prior to the auction, Dayton.com was owned by CCH Domains. According to an Archive.org entry from September of 2013, prior to the sale, Dayton.com had been developed, although only 15 pages are indexed in Google right now.
Whatever its plans are for Dayton.com, I think the Dayton Daily News made a wise acquisition, assuming it was the company that bought this domain name. The price seems very fair for an end user buyer, and there are a few options for using this asset.
dayton.buzz $5600 on the upcoming .BUZZ preemie list. 10% of .com? Sound fair? Somebody will buy it.
Bill
I would say “good luck” with that, but what do I know.
It will take 10 years for someone to type in Dayton.buzz, and the .com still sounds better, you have to pay for quality, and fakes are always cheaper.
DaytonNews.com is MORE brandable than Dayton.com if the buyer is indeed the local newspaper…no-brainer.
.com (and to a lesser extent, .org) is a branding device in and of itself.
Do you have professional much background in brands and branding?
oooooooo… very costly , i think dayton.com is going to a very useful site
Another good article.