Dayton Daily News Appears to Acquire Dayton.com

ActiveDayton.comShortly 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.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn
  1. 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.

    • .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?

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Recent Posts

ICA Extends Nomination Deadline for 2 Industry Awards

1
The ICA is seeking nominations for two domain industry awards, and the nomination deadline has been extended to this coming Sunday (11/3). All members...

Why I Am Not Testing More Services

5
A colleague emailed to ask me why I am not working with a specific landing page service he has been using. I neither have...

Managing Your Own Landers Can be Difficult

9
One of my favorite aspects of the business of domain investing is negotiating my own deals with prospective buyers. In order to generate some...

Com Laude Hosting DotBrand Webinar with ICANN’s Andee Hill

2
The second application round for new gTLD applications seems to be gearing up. ICANN has slowly been releasing new information about applying for a...

Diligence Tip: Remove the Domain Name from Email

1
I do diligence on a prospective buyer because I like to know who is on the other end of an inquiry/offer email. In general,...