Facebook Rebrands as Meta; Using Meta.com

A little over a week ago, I read that Facebook was planning to rebrand in a fashion similar to the Google / Alphabet rebrand. The idea behind the rebrand was Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s promise to plan to turn the company into a metaverse-focused business. The news, as I understand, was first reported by The Verge.

Soon after the article was published in The Verge, speculation began to mount about what Facebook – or perhaps a parent entity would be called. Because a Mark Zuckerberg related entity owned Meta.com already, it would be pretty easy for Facebook to rebrand as Meta. At the time of publication, Meta.com was forwarding to Meta.org, the website for a project called Meta from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

At today’s Facebook Connect 2021 event livestream, Zuckerberg announced the corporate rebrand, and the name chosen was, in fact, Meta. At some point today, Meta.com stopped forwarding to Meta.org, and the domain name now forwards to a page within the Facebook.com website sharing what Facebooks expects to come with its metaverse project.

Because Meta.com is registered under Whois privacy at GoDaddy, it is not possible to see the registrant of the domain name. It is also impossible to see if the domain name changed hands to reflect an ownership change. Regardless of any ownership changes, owning Meta.com made the brand transition much easier. I would imagine that is a mid-eight figure domain name at the moment.

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

21 COMMENTS

  1. You’ve heard of the shifting sands of time. This is the shifting brands of time.

    Companies like Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook can sand-shift their liability. They have enough money to do that without missing losing power or reach. They are becoming the untouchables.

  2. Oh man, and I bet they are the ones who bought my meta domain a few weeks ago. They took the first price I threw out there. Still decent considering it only cost me $20 and I sold it for mid five figures but is still stings a bit.

      • Yeah meta.com is in another league from the kinds of domains i have. it was just a metakeyword.com domain. A law firm contacted me to buy it. I gave them a number and they took it but had I knew facebook was going meta I would of asked for more. Oh well.

        • I’ve got several META__.com domains. I’ve been too busy to list. I picked these up yrs ago.

          Should I list on Dan or Afternic and Sedo?

          The second key words are solid and short and reflect the metaverse

          Congrats on your sale. Sounds like it was at least 1000x – bravo

  3. I remember going to an event hosted by META (meta.com) about maybe 7 yrs ago. They created a cool product – virtual reality – and raised meta millions. either they went bankrupt or its assets were purchased by a top tech company. They launched out of a 30 million mansion down the road from Steve Jobs’s house

    They were too early – bad timing, great product

    • my mistake – the company was META but it used the URL metavision.com….received over 70 million in funding…great product, but it went belly up in 2019 – assets picked up pennies on the dollar

  4. When you consider how Facebook is a cancer of establishment and state censorship and suppression of speech and against global freedom that has been METAstasizing all throughout America and the entire world, the switch to Meta.com couldn’t be more fitting.

    • Just copied this comment over to TheD and DNW. $10 says Andrew won’t even allow it to appear (his most current “meta” thread there now) since he put me on total censorship recently, but it’s possible Raymond might allow it so no bets for that.

      I must admit, Elliot and I disagree occasionally but he is definitely much better than the domain blog norm when it comes to censorship.

    • i don’t see a reason why FB would need a multi hour down time for a simple rebrand as this requires little maintenance and the downtime probably cost them alot.. feel like that was a technical difficulty

  5. Some good commentary on the name change to “Meta” early in this video:

    “Facebook Censoring Real People Accused Of Being Bots”

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