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‘The Domain Name is Not for Sale’


I’ve tried to buy thousands of domain names from registrants who told me some variation of ‘the domain name is not for sale.’ That may be true at that point in time, but the status can change. It doesn’t hurt to follow-up every once in a while.

I recently spent some time looking through hundreds of old emails I sent trying to buy domain names. I followed up on some older leads to re-engage the owners. Perhaps circumstances had changed since our last discussion. I like to follow-up between 6 months and a year after an email exchange, when I see a domain name isn’t being used.

My Inquiry Reply Email Signature

When someone inquires about buying a domain name listed for sale via Embrace.com, they will read my response and the accompanying email signature. You’ll notice a few things I think are important for an informative signature to include.

In addition to including a link to the website’s homepage, I include a link to my LinkedIn profile. This serves two purposes. For one thing, the prospective buyer can see that I am a real person with experience related to domain names. This might make them more comfortable doing business with my company. In addition, if they click through to my profile, I may be able to see more information about them, making me more comfortable.

Dan.com Payout Change for Active LTO Deals is Unacceptable

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how Dan.com is holding up payouts on LTO deals. The payout change was vaguely alluded to in bullet point 9 on a product update posted the day the Afternic LTO was announced. No reason for the change was announced, and it is not at all clear what the actual payout policy is now.

Prior to the change, Dan.com would send a payout to the seller the business day after a buyer made an installment payment. After the change, some payouts have been delayed, and there does not appear to be consistency on payout timing. Worse yet, neither Dan nor GoDaddy have offered any explanation about why delaying payouts is necessary.

In my opinion, changing the payout timing for active LTO deals is unacceptable. Dan.com should return to issuing payouts to sellers the day after receiving the monthly installment payouts from buyers on deals that were created prior to the payout change. This is what sellers expected when they listed domain names for sale on Dan.com – and when the domain names were sold prior to the product update announcement last month.

Sold via Sedo, NPC.ai is Largest Public .AI Sale

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This morning, Sedo emailed its weekly sales report, and the top reported sale was NPC.ai. The NPC.ai domain name sold via Sedo for $250,000 USD. Notably, this sale transacted via SedoMLS, meaning the domain name was purchased through a partner domain registrar.

According to NameBio, the $250,000 sale of NPC.ai is the largest publicly reported .AI domain name sale of all time. Previously, the largest .AI sale was Service.ai, which sold in late July for $127,500. Also according to NameBio, this is the fifth largest publicly reported domain name sale of the year at Sedo.

Retention.com Reportedly Acquired for $800,000

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Adam Robinson is the CEO of Retention.com, a company that aims to help businesses increase revenue by offering a variety of customer retention tools. When the business was founded, it was known as GetEmails and used GetEmails.com. The company upgraded its domain name to Retention.com in 2020, as noted by DomainGang.

Yesterday, Adam tweeted about acquiring a domain name for $800,000, and I saw it after George Kirikos reposted the tweet:

SimilarWeb Illustrates the .com Effect with Threads

Much has been said about Meta’s launch of its Threads app on the Threads.net domain name. For many years, much has also been said about the impact of not using a brand match .com domain name when launching a product or a service. SimilarWeb, a web analytics company, illustrates the .com effect using Threads as an example.

James Iles highlighted this report today: