In December of 2019, I wrote about Mercury acquiring its brand match Mercury.com domain name. The company had been operating on the Mercury.CO domain name, but it had anticipated moving to the Mercury.com domain name at some point in the future. That migration has happened, and the company can now be found by visiting Mercury.com.
Notably, Mercury founder Immad Akhund shared how the company was able to acquire its brand match domain name. In a series of tweets, which I have posted chronologically below, Immad shared details of how it acquired Mercury.com from HP. Although he did not share the price of the domain name, I am sure it was very expensive. I think the eighth and final tweet explains why acquiring Mercury.com was so crucial for the banking brand:
1/ Excited to finally announce that we are moving from https://t.co/2ABDeDy22Y to https://t.co/Vg8eR1F8SI @Bankmercury!
This is the end of a 2.5 year domain acquisition story and am excited to finally have the new domain live.https://t.co/T3S3WCeGdL
— immad (@immad) February 4, 2020
2/ Mercury is the Roman God of financial gain. We loved the name and got https://t.co/2ABDeDy22Y before we even incorporated the company.
At the time https://t.co/Vg8eR1F8SI was redirecting to a product on the https://t.co/SLslTaYcND domain.
— immad (@immad) February 4, 2020
3/ HP had acquired Mercury Interactive in 2006 and as part of that got the https://t.co/Vg8eR1F8SI domain: https://t.co/sCi1vfYsRE@pmarca is on the board of HP and after investing in @BankMercury he helped kick off a long chain of emails to figure out who controlled the domain.
— immad (@immad) February 4, 2020
4/ It turned out that https://t.co/Vg8eR1F8SI was transferred to HPE, then to Microfocus in a series of spinoffs and acquisitions.
Microfocus is a $4b public UK based company. Eventually I was introduced to a very friendly person in Utah who was responsible for this domain.
— immad (@immad) February 4, 2020
5/ After a few back and forth it turned out that Microfocus didn’t want to sell the domain. They felt that there was still some name recognition for the domain (even though it didn’t point to anything) and marketing/sales there didn’t want to sell it.
— immad (@immad) February 4, 2020
6/ We stayed in contact over 2 years and finally they decided late last year that they were ready to let go of the domain. Being a startup and having a long standing relationship we quickly jumped on the opportunity and were able to close before the domain was on the open market.
— immad (@immad) February 4, 2020
7/ For many new startups getting the dot com is not important. Nowadays most people are getting to your company via mobile apps or web search where direct name hits don’t matter as much.
However for us we felt getting https://t.co/Vg8eR1F8SI was important because..
— immad (@immad) February 4, 2020
8/
a) Trust is crucial in banking.
b) We knew the domain would be bought by someone else if we didn’t act and potentially not available again.
c) We want to be a long term 50+ year company and owning the domain is part of our long term commitment./END
— immad (@immad) February 4, 2020
Great name, the seller obviously didn’t do itself much justice not shopping it around. It happens.
Depends on the price. They were the most obvious buyer for this name and they would have had daily problems trying to run a business on a .co.
Waste of time shopping things around unless the price is low. The seller paid 700k in 2004 so I’d guess it was a significant price.