San Francisco Business Times (behind a paywall) and TechCrunch wrote articles about Kyte shutting down. Kyte was a car rental service that operated on the brand matching Kyte.com domain name.
According to a Public Notice of Intellectual Property Sale listing on DailyDac.com, the company paid $550,000 to acquire the Kyte.com domain name in 2021. A total of 31 domain names are available as part of this listing.
While a $550,000 domain name sale is substantial, it would tie for the 28th largest publicly reported domain name sale of 2021. According to the 2021 domain name sale archive maintained by DNJournal, Lender.com and Wolf.com both sold for $550,000 in 2021.
Notably, NameBio shows the Kyte.com domain name previously sold on NameJet for $5,303 in March of 2015.
As every domain investor and business operator knows, an exceptional domain name can help a business tremendously. It can’t overcome all business obstacles though. There are quite a few companies that use Kyte in their branding, so perhaps this domain name will eventually be acquired by one of them.
Maybe their poor choice of domain name and how much they paid for it was indicative of how they ran their business