Home Blog Page 249

Horse Trading Gets Betcast.com and Fairway.com Deals Done

1

Two weeks ago, I reported that Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation acquired Fairway.com in a deal that was put together by Andrew Miller. The seller in that deal was NBCUniversal. The Fairway.com acquisition came shortly after Fairway acquired Home.com.

Yesterday morning, Jamie Zoch reported that NBCUniversal acquired the Betcast.com domain name to go along with its Betcast brand. Andrew Miller replied to the tweet to confirm the acquisition since he was involved in that deal as well. While these two domain name acquisitions are unrelated, it is because of Andrew Miller’s dealmaking that they both came together serendipitously.

I reached out to Andrew to see if he could share some background about these deals without sharing confidential details, and here’s what he shared with me:

Hallmark.TV UDRP Decision is Upsetting

13

It’s not surprising that Hallmark Licensing, LLC, the company behind the iconic Hallmark brand, would want to have the Hallmark.TV domain name. In addition to owning various Hallmark-related entities, Hallmark Licensing operates the Hallmark Channel, and it uses the brand match HallmarkChannel.com domain name for this line of business. It may not need Hallmark.TV, but I am sure the company  would want to own the domain name.

Hallmark Licensing, LLC opted to file a UDRP complaint to take possession of Hallmark.TV. The decision was published today, and while Hallmark Licensing prevailed, the rationale for why the company prevailed is upsetting to me.

Efty and Saw.com Announce Brokerage Partnership

Many domain investors use Efty landing pages to broker their own domain name sales. They receive inbound inquiries generated from their domain names, and they negotiate the sale of their domain names on their own. I enjoy negotiating a domain name sale on my own, but it is very possible I am leaving money on the table every time I do a deal.

In a blog post this morning, Efty announced a new brokerage partnership with Saw.com, the domain brokerage co-founded by Amanda Waltz and Jeff Gabriel. Efty users will be able to assign leads to a broker from Saw.com who will broker the sale on behalf of the domain registrant. Efty users will set a target price and a floor price, and the broker will work to close a deal on behalf of the seller at the desired price.

Rows.com Acquired for $100k for DashDash Rebrand

2

This morning, I read a TechCrunch article about a company called Rows that was formerly known as dashdash, before a major rebrand. The article covered the company’s $16 million Series B round of funding, which followed its $8 million Series A round of funding in 2018. Smartly, the company acquired its matching Rows.com domain name in advance of the rebranding effort.

Historic Whois records at DomainTools show that Rows.com had previously been owned by Future Media Architects (FMA). FMA owns a large portfolio of exceptional domain names, and most of them are for sale. The company uses Saw.com to broker domain names on its behalf. From what I can tell, Rows.com was acquired by DashDash in late April or early May of 2020.

One must look no further than the company’s blog post about the Rows rebrand to learn how much the company paid to acquire the Rows.com domain name:

Great Insight in 2021 Global Domain Report from InterNetX and Sedo

InterNetX and Sedo just published its comprehensive Global Domain Report for 2021. The annual report is filled with useful domain name data, insights, highlights, and trends. At 76 pages in length, the report covers a wide variety of topics that will be interesting for domain investors to read. The report pdf is free to download (after sharing some contact information). The extensive report includes data shared by Verisign, Donuts, Radix, and other registry and registrar businesses.

TransferWise Acquires Wise.com and Rebrands as Wise

7

Last November, Jamie Zoch detected a change in the Whois record for the Wise.com domain name. Wise.com had been owned by Broadcom / Symantec, and the domain name transferred from CSC to GoDaddy under Whois privacy. In a tweet, Jamie predicted that an online money transfer service called TransferWise was going to be revealed as the buyer of the domain name: