If you use Afternic and its landing pages for your domain names, chances are good that you have a Lead Center filled with leads that look similar to this:
If you’re lucky, you have one or two sold domain names amongst many Stalled and Confused leads. This can be frustrating, particularly since sellers don’t get much of an inside look at the progression of their leads.
GoDaddy issued a press release this morning revealing its 2025 Super Bowl commercials. As expected, the focus of these two commercials is on GoDaddy Airo, the company’s artificial intelligence toolset designed to help customers with everything from domain name registration to website and logo design. I suspect we will see a heavy dose of AI in this year’s Super Bowl commercials.
Notably for domain investors, GoDaddy ends the commercials by displaying its GoDaddy.com domain name.
You can watch the 30 second television spot here:
You can watch the 60 second television commercial here:
Namecheap CEO Richard Kirkendall has shared many .AI domain name sales over the last year or so. NameBio lists more than 1,000 .AI domain name sales at Namecheap in its database.
This afternoon, Richard shared a handful of high value .AI domain name sales. He also shared some pretty big news about .AI expiry auctions going forward. Expired .ai domain names will now be auctioned exclusively at Namecheap. In addition, the auctions will be conducted daily rather than once a month as they had been running previously.
I went to the ICA meeting in Las Vegas last week. I don’t particularly enjoy leaving my family when they have many different activities and events at happening home, but the trip was well worth that inconvenience.
At around 200 attendees, the ICA event is fairly small and manageable. I was able to connect with many friends and colleagues from around the world who I don’t see or talk to on a regular basis. I attended a few of the keynotes, AMAs, as well as the memorial for Howard Neu and the ICA award presentations. I thought they were all well done and offered a good chance to ask questions and chat with some of the leaders from companies that work closely with domain investors.
It was a very good opportunity to get a pulse of the domain investment space from all areas of the investment community.
One of the things I like about DropCatch.com auctions is that I get control of the domain names almost immediately after I pay for them. I’ll win an auction or receive the backorder success emails, visit the account to pay, and the names appear instantly in my associated NameBright account.
That’s what typically happens. Yesterday, I bought 3 domain names via auction and paid for them immediately. The domain names did not appear in my account. I submitted a support ticket but didn’t hear back. I followed up this morning when I still hadn’t heard anything, but that went unanswered. To my knowledge, there hasn’t been any communication about an issue from anyone at the company so I did not know if this was an isolated issue or something more widespread.
Last year, I won a non-.com auction at Dynadot. The domain name may be considered a typo of another word word, but this “typo” has 100+/- TLDs registered, which is what caught my attention. In fact, at least 15 of those TLDs are developed, so there’s quite a bit of usage around this brandable term.
Shortly after buying the domain name for less than $20, I listed it for sale on Afternic. Somehow, I mistyped the domain name and listed the correctly spelled non -.com domain name. Apparently, when I later searched my Afternic account for the domain name and didn’t see it, I added it a second time – this time with the actual domain name I bought and own.
