Jumpkicks, Inc. is a development-stage company whose stock is traded on the Over the Counter Bulletin Board Market. The company is an online martial arts retailer that sells products, such as uniforms, shirts, equipment, mats, and other products related to martial arts. They also provide information of interest to martial artists and instructors. The company operates exclusively online.
Until May of 2008, the company operated online on Jumpkicks.com, however, something happened in May that caused the company to lose their primary domain name. A Whois search from April 15 revealed that the domain name wasn’t set to expire until March of 2009, so a forgotten renewal seems to be out of the question.
To remediate the situation, the company purchased other domain names and uploaded their website on to these new domain names: Jumpkicks.net, Jumpkicks.org, Jumpkicks.us, and Jumpkicks.info. The company is also pursuing other options to get their primary .com domain name back.
Unfortunately for Jumpkicks, they are now realizing just how important the .com domain name is to their company’s operations. Because of the situation, the publicly traded company was forced to note this in their a 10K/A filed today.
“Unfortunately, the domain name www.jumpkicks.com lent significant value to our company. The long history of the Site drew regular repeat traffic. We are now attempting to draw traffic to the new domain names, but we have thus far been unable to do so successfully. If we are not able to generate significant traffic, we will not be able to generate significant revenue to support our operations.”
This goes to show how important an established domain name is to a company and why many small companies with high value domain names are reluctant to sell their domain name and move it to a lesser known domain name.
Why dont they just buy it back from e-Nom
http://www.acquirethisname.com/domain-name-offer.aspx?domain=jumpkicks.com
@Desmond
I suspect they want to determine how it was lost before doing anything. From my vantage point, it doesn’t look like it expired or dropped, so something must have happened for Enom to gain control. If it’s a legal issue, it wouldn’t make sense to try and purchase it right away.
It appears the domain did have a 3-14-2008 expire date as of 3-17-2008. (3-17-2008 whois history record.) This means the domain hit the expire date to me.
The March 14, 2009 expire date on the whois record for 4-15-2008 is likely an Auto Renew Period.
From whois history record 03-17-2008:
Creation date: 14 Mar 2002 11:30:11
Expiration date: 14 Mar 2008 00:00:00
As with most TOS, if the domain hit’s the expiry date, the registrar has rights to the domain if they choose to.
@Jamie
Good call – thanks. 🙂
For the sake of the company, my suggestion would be to buy the name from e-nom and figure out what happened later. I know they want to know how they lost the domain, but the company could go down the tubes in the meantime.
Lou’s right.
Now’s not the time to figure out what happened. Just buy the darn thing; including a legal notice to the effect that you’re doing so “under protest” and while reserving all your legal rights should you discover … blah, blah, blah.
But get that name back.
Now.
Per Compete, their traffic was only 3,000 per month in February prior to losing the domain. Maybe they can’t afford to buy it back (or be in business). It is probably easier to explain to investors the way they have done it. Just conjecture.
Nice work finding this story. This would make an interesting case study if someone were to dive into their financials and do some before and after losing the .com and do some analysis.