This morning, I noticed something different in a domain name renewal email from GoDaddy. Instead of telling me exactly what domain names I renewed in the renewal receipt email, it simply said “.COM Domain Renewal” along with the term and price. You can see what this looks like below:
This is either a change that was made today or a data retrieval error.
I don’t love asking prospective buyers to make an offer to buy a domain name, particularly on higher value assets. Not only does it encourage time wasting lowball offers, it also implies that the seller is open to considering any offer, and people tend to make unrealistically low opening offers fearing a realistic offer will lead to a very high counteroffer. It can be a frustrating waste of time for all involved.
That being said, I don’t like to have “buy now” pricing for my highest value domain names. The higher end of the domain name market is dynamic, and my pricing can also vary based on my own business performance. A domain name can be priced at $175k one day and $150k or $250k the next day, depending on different factors.
A few years ago, I wrote about domain names being offered up on Rally, “a platform for buying & selling equity shares in collectible assets.” It looks like the company offered fractional ownership in at least two domain names that I can see – HotSpot.com and Directions.com.
HotSpot.com currently has a $136,500 “market cap” and Directions.com has a $68,600 “market cap” on the platform. I am not familiar with the platform, but it looks like both domain names are trading for less than when shares were first available on the platform.
The most popular auction events in the last year have been the monthly .AI expiry auctions held by the .AI registry in Anguilla. Apparently, there has been a dearth of non-paying bidders who participate in these auctions. As a result, the .AI registry is making a change.
Vincent Cate, the person who manages the .AI registry on behalf of Anguilla, announced two changes that are being made with the hope of discouraging and/or eliminating the number of non-paying bidders:
When I saw a UDRP had been filed against PitStop.com by a company called Distribuidora Automotiva S.A., I spent a couple of minutes checking the Whois history at DomainTools. My non-legal conclusion was that this UDRP is DOA and it will result in a finding of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking (RDNH).
The domain name was defended by attorney John Berryhill, and the three member UDRP panel ruled in favor of the registrant. This was not a surprise. PitStop.com is a descriptive domain name, with the “pit stop” phrase used by brands and used generically throughout the world. One entity should not have the right to control the .com domain name for a descriptive term, in my opinion.
Recently, I started buying non .com domain names here and there when I see a keyword that I think well-matches the extension. I’m not interested in sharing specifics with you, but I have bought .AI, .IO, .CO, .APP, and .DEV domain names in auction, in addition to .XYZ that I previously wrote about. Non .com domain names is a small percentage of my portfolio and a fraction of a percentage of inventory cost.
One word of caution is that some extensions have rules that need to be followed in order to use the domain name. I learned this after winning a .Dev domain name in auction at Namecheap. A day or two after setting the nameservers to Afternic, the domain name did not resolve to a landing page. I checked in with Afternic and the domain name was set up correctly there. I submitted a ticket at Namecheap to see what was preventing the domain name from resolving, and here’s what I was told:
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