Mike Berkens posted an article about the Ebay auction for the Nets.com domain name that ended last week. The unknown reserve price was not met, and the high bid was $71,300. An article in the New York Times gives us information about the owners of Nets.com and how much they would like to get for the domain name.
Here are some of the details, which can be found in a photo caption within the NY Times article:
“Jane Hill, who runs the New Mexico company that owns Nets.com, with her son John. She has asked the Nets for $5 million for the domain, a figure the team has rejected.”
It’s not really a surprise to me that the Brooklyn Nets declined to pay the reported $5 million for the domain name. That would be one of the largest domain name sales of all time, surpassing exceptional public domain name sales like Wine.com, Shop.com, Investing.com, Pizza.com, and Social.com. It would even pass the $1.5 million sale of Russia.com, which is interesting because the Brooklyn Nets is owned by Mikhail Prokhorov, one of the most wealthy people in Russia.
I do believe the Nets would benefit from owning Nets.com. I presume they are content with BrooklynNets.com since the Brooklyn “brand” has become so intertwined with the team’s branding. However, shortening the domain name to Nets.com would make it easier to remember, easier to place the url on branded marketing materials, and would help offset any traffic leakage.
I think it’s been funny reading how the owners have been “trolling” the Nets basketball team by doing various things with the domain name, and I think you’ll find the article interesting.
One additional bit of information in the article was that the owner of Nets.com “sold the domain name Roadrunner.com to Time Warner for a seven-figure sum, a sale that was never publicly disclosed.” She may not be a domain investor, but she seems to have done a great job of picking domain names to buy back in the day.
Looks like Nets.com is up for sale again on Ebay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Nets-com-Premium-Domain-Name-/221596556863
Thanks to Scott for sharing.
I’d like to see the Home in Malibu and the Lamborghini the seller is dreaming about when the name sells, must be nice 🙂 Unfortunately for the seller it wont sell for near that, forcing him to settle for a 3bd 2bath home in the Suburbs and driving a Toyota Prius
This is a case of pure greed and inexperience INO, The fact the seller is posting the name on ebay shows the inexperience, and the $5M price tag shows just how greedy he is, but the worst part of all is his stupidity, He doesn’t know that when you post a name like this on Ebay and it’s doesn’t sell for near what your asking, in this case a high bid of $70K, it devalues the name, in a sense it sets the market price..
If the seller had any brains he’d have Heritage broker or auction the name on his behalf, they’d do a hell of a better job than he ever would.
The issue is that there is one obvious buyer with deep pockets, but they don’t value the name at what the seller wants for it. Either the seller will have to lower the asking price, find another buyer with deep pockets, or keep the domain name.
Raider@ So True, we all want whot we can’t have, the caveat being if they have a TM
Her target buyer is the Brooklyn Nets. Although there are clearly many uses for the keyword, I don’t see any other company spending that kind of money on a domain name. If it was Net.com, it would be different story.
My sentiments exactly, DNSelect.
This is another example that attempting to publicly wrestle your single most potential buyer into a purchase does not work. A strategy and professional mediation *might* get better results, e.g. by using a brokerage service such as Igloo, Sedo etc.
The eBay auction comes with an unknown but quite high reserve, BTW. So don’t expect this to sell.
In new york times article, there is a clear lie, the owner claims that its a name of a russian women working in her office.
“At the bottom of the page was a message written in Russian that translated roughly to “Mikhail, are you watching? Vilena wants to know.”
The website Complex posted an article with the headline “Did Mark Cuban Buy Nets.com to Take Shots at the Brooklyn Nets and their Owner Mikhail Prokhorov?” And “Vilena,” according to one widely promulgated theory, was the name of a woman involved in an incident in 2007 in which Prokhorov was questioned in a prostitution inquiry in France.
In fact, Hill said, Vilena was simply the name of a Russian woman in her accounting department who had helped type the message.”
She is lying, Vilena is not Russian name. I am Russian and i never heard anyone name that, hence she just wants to troll, without seeming like she is trolling and it seems they are getting desperate. This is the worst kind of trolling, desperate and greedy.
Pandora’s box is opened: Mashable got whiff of the auction and made references to “conniving domain squatters”: http://mashable.com/2014/11/12/nba-nets-domain/