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BuyDomains Discontinues Sharing Domain Name Sales

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BuyDomains owns and operates a very large domain name portfolio consisting of hundreds of thousands of domain names – possibly millions. Many of the domain names I have seen are inventory quality domain names that would be desired by small to medium-sized businesses. I would guess the company sells a greater volume of domain names that just about any other industry company focusing on end user sales.

For many years, BuyDomains has publicly shared a percentage of its domain name sales that aren’t subject to confidentiality agreements. Each year, the company has shared thousands of domain names, and those sales were syndicated by NameBio. In 2022 alone, BuyDomains reported 4,261 domain name sales worth nearly $10 million USD, according to NameBio. In the past 5 years, the company has reported $43.8 million in domain name sales.

Over the weekend, Alexej Kirillov asked NameBio if BuyDomains stopped reporting its domain name sales publicly:

Bodis: “August Parking Earnings Adjustment”

This morning, I received an email from Bodis announcing an “earnings adjustment” for the month of August. The company reported that customers will receive a revenue adjustment (balance decrease) due to “advertiser defaults” experienced by its upstream provider. From what I can tell, this isn’t an action targeting individual accounts, but it impacts all customers.

I use Bodis for parking on a handful of traffic-receiving domain names. The adjustment to my earnings was very small and will have no impact on my business. I would imagine others who have a greater focus on PPC income will be more impacted by this news. Unfortunately, I don’t know of anything customers can do to prevent this from impacting their account.

Here is the email I received from Bodis with details about the earnings adjustment and directions on how to see the impact on individual accounts:

Voice is “Winding Down Operations”

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Yesterday evening, Michael Cyger shared an email that he received from Voice, the company that paid $30 million to acquire the Voice.com domain name in 2019. In the email Michael received, the company announced it will be shutting down.

In a series of tweets posted last night, Voice shared why it made the decision to shut down:

You Can Now Jump into Expiry Auctions at NameJet

Earlier this Summer, NameJet unveiled its “new” website design. To be honest, I was disappointed that the new design was essentially a NameJet branded website utilizing the Snapnames platform. It’s not the look and feel of the platform that bothers me – it’s the search functionality or lack thereof. I won’t belabor the topic since I have already shared quite a bit of feedback along with others like Shane Cultra.

One change to the platform that can be viewed as a positive to some people is the ability to participate in expiry auctions that are ongoing. Previously, a person could only participate in an expiry auction if the domain name was backordered prior to the auction’s start. Once the backorder deadline passed, the expired domain name would be put into a private auction. If you did not backorder the domain name, you could not participate.

Brannan’s at The Battery Show to Sell Batteries.com

In one of the first articles I ever wrote in June of 2007, I suggested that domain investment companies would benefit from educating end user buyers to help sell them domain names. Here’s an excerpt from that ancient article I wrote back when I used a combination of a pen and paper, a typewriter, and my Apple II GS to publish articles:

“I think it would be in the best interest of the domain investment community and a company like Fabulous, BuyDomains.com, or an otherwise motivated company to sponsor workshops or seminars focused on teaching end users about domain names at industry specific tradeshows. I frequently see advertising agencies and consultants sponsoring lunch seminars at tradeshows to show how their particular company can help maximize advertising dollars. I believe if a company like Fabulous sent Dan Warner to teach a group of entrepreneurial business people how a generic domain name can help their business, it would be beneficial to the company and to the domain business at large.”

OpenAI Secures ChatGPT.com

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In March of this year, OpenAI filed a UDRP proceeding against the ChatGPT.com domain name at the World Intellectual Property Organization. OpenAI’s ChatGPT service has become one of the most popular artificial intelligence-driven chat platforms with well over 100 million users. The company uses chat.openai.com for its ChatGPT platform.

Prior to the filing of the UDRP, ChatGPT.com had been used by a website called ChatAI.com. You can have a look at how it was being used by visiting Archive.org. After the UDRP was filed, Whois privacy was lifted, and the Whois record showed the domain name was owned and used by a company in Puerto Rico called Site Matrix.