Dave Evanson, Senior Domain Broker at Sedo, announced that he brokered the sale of Profitable.com for $200,000. Current Whois records show that the domain name just moved into Sedo’s escrow account, so it would seem that the buyer already paid for the domain name and the transfer of the domain name is pending:
Just sold profitable .com for $200,000 @sedo!! Congrats to buyer and seller!!
— dave evanson (@SedoDaveEvanson) February 11, 2020
Earlier this morning, GoDaddy announced that the company will acquire Uniregistry, in a deal expected to close in the second quarter of this year. This is obviously huge news for domain investors for a variety of reasons. What might get lost in the domain investment space is the news that GoDaddy is also going to be acquiring Brandsight, a corporate domain name management and consulting firm. I also think this is an important acquisition for GoDaddy.
GoDaddy announced a major corporate acquisition in a press release this morning. GoDaddy will be acquiring Uniregistry, the company founded and operated by Frank Schilling. Uniregistry operates a Cayman-based domain name registrar and domain name brokerage platform. GoDaddy is also acquiring Name Administration, a related entity, which owns a portfolio of more than 350,000 domain names. GoDaddy is not acquiring Uniregistry’s domain registry, which operates 26 new gTLD extensions.
Rick Schwartz hosted a domain investor event in Asheville, North Carolina last Summer, and it was well attended. This morning on Twitter, Rick announced he will be hosting the event again this Summer in Asheville:
Morning Folks!!
BREAKING!!
I am looking at having Ricks 2nd Annual Asheville Domain Investor Meet-up and Family Outing starting Thursday August 13th.
The show for professional #domain investors.#Domains #Branding #GlobalPresence #AshevilleMeetUp #Asheville #RealEstate
— Rick Schwartz 👑 The DomainKing® 👑 Since 1995 (@DomainKing) February 11, 2020
Namecheap sent out an email to customers this afternoon to warn them about the potential for price increases on .com domain names. The company’s warning comes shortly after Namecheap CEO Richard Kirkendall penned an article on the company blog, which has been trending on Hacker News this afternoon.
As you can see below, Namecheap is letting its customers know about the reason prices may increase to buy and renew .com domain name, and the company is advising customers about how they can share their opinions with ICANN to voice opposition to the price increases. Over the weekend, Dynadot and NameBright also sent similar emails to their customers, and I hope other domain registrars do the same. The ICA created a tool to make it easier for domain registrants to comment to ICANN.
Here’s the email Namecheap sent to customers this afternoon (thanks to Prakhar Bindal for sharing this with me):
At NamesCon last week, I had a chance to briefly speak with Andy Booth. I have known and done a modest amount of business with Andy and his brother James Booth, and I was sorry I did not have much time to speak with them. One topic Andy and I chatted about was if the value of a domain name changes (at least on a psychological level) when the domain name is acquired by a domain investor from a larger company. Andy thought it would be neat to spark a discussion about the topic, and we are both eager to see what readers think.
