Namecheap Acquires IZ.com and Poke.com

A little over a month ago, I reported that Namecheap acquired Cluster.com for $150,000 in a private transaction. The acquisition was made by the company “as a brand asset for a future product,” according to Namecheap CEO Richard Kirkendall. I recently learned that Namecheap has acquired two additional high value domain names: IZ.com and Poke.com.

Richard confirmed that Namecheap acquired IZ.com for $625,000 and Poke.com for $150,000. Both of these domain names temporarily resolve to “for sale” pages hosted by Namecheap, but the company has plans to use them. Like the Cluster.com acquisition, IZ.com and Poke.com have been acquired as brand assets for future use by Namecheap.

I believe IZ.com is going to be the first publicly reported two letter .com domain name sale in over a year, as recorded by NameBio. The €554,000 sale of OA.com ($609,068 USD) in a Sedo auction was the last publicly reported LL .com domain name sale in February of 2020. I have seen several other LL .com domain names change hands since then, but those deals do not appear to have been reported publicly.

I am not sure how IZ.com was acquired, but I understand Poke.com was sold via Sedo and its Sr. Broker, Dave Evanson, as I received an email from Dave in March announcing the domain name was for sale. (Update: I was told that IZ.com was brokered by QEIP).

I think these two acquisitions were solid deals for Namecheap.

Namecheap has several descriptive domain name assets in its internal domain name portfolio, in addition to Cluster.com. The company also owns Visual.com, Spaceship.com, and Validation.com.

The $625,000 sale of IZ.com will likely land on the DNJournal top ten list for 2021 year to date sales. With the spate of recent six figure sales, I don’t know where Poke.com will place on the report when it gets updated. I added it to the Embrace.com list of recent one word .com domain name sales.