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:
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.
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.”
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.
I receive uneducated domain name purchase offers nearly every day. Some prospective buyers may hope to get lucky with a deal and some genuinely haven’t the foggiest idea that domain names sell for serious amounts of money. The result is that my self-managed landers for high value domain names receive far more offers that aren’t serious than offers from bonafide buyers.
For the 80%+ of my portfolio that is replaceable inventory and utilize Dan.com or Afternic landing pages, I set minimum offer amounts to prevent a deluge of lowball offers. The lowest minimum offer I allow on any of my domain names is just shy of $1,000.
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