Last week, I wrote about my first domain name sale at Spaceship. The only hiccup was the $57 fee that was charged by PayPal when my payment was disbursed to me. This was partially my fault for not investigating further when Spaceship warned me about the potential for fees:
“Additionally, please note that you may incur fees when receiving funds. These fees are determined by the payout method and are beyond our control.”
I sold my first domain name via Spaceship today, and I thought I would share how it came about.
I recently listed nearly 2,000 domain names for sale on Spaceship with BIN prices and the make offer option enabled. The domain names were all priced below $5,000. None of the domain names were parked at Spaceship. I figured I would give Spaceship/Namecheap the opportunity to sell these domain names within their network, and if a domain name is purchased, I would pay the 5% commission.
Keeping my nameservers at Afternic allowed me to avoid paying a higher commission if one of these domain names was sold via GoDaddy. Since the time I listed domain names on Spaceship, I closed somewhere around 20 BIN + LTO deals at GoDaddy. Given how many domain names I have sold at GoDaddy in the time I’ve had many listed on Spaceship, I might have paid more in a commission penalty than I would saved, although it’s impossible to know if these buyers would have bought at Spaceship with their nameservers.
Is Southwest Airlines planning to open airport clubs and lounges? If domain name registrations are an early indicator, the airline is planning to open its own Southwest Airline Clubs or Southwest Airlines Lounges. In fact, a week and a half ago, The Street wrote about Southwest Airlines opening its first airport lounge.
This morning in my DomainTools Registrant Monitor alert email, I noticed several domain names that are related to Southwest Airlines. These domain names were registered at MarkMonitor under the DNStinations, Inc. privacy service offered by the corporate-favored domain registrar:
I was in my Atom.com dashboard this evening, when I saw a note to customers in the message center. According to the note, “Sedo has decided to end its partnership with Atom.” Atom customers who have premium listings on the platform also automatically have their domain names appear for sale on Sedo. This will no longer be the case.
I am not really sure why Sedo would choose to end this relationship with Atom. It would seem to be a good chance to expand its inventory of domain names for sale, particularly in growing verticals like .AI where Atom seems to be making some inroads.
The valuable Icy.com domain name has reportedly been acquired for a 7 figure sum. Manik Kundra, who founded a company called Icy Studios, announced the acquisition on LinkedIn last night. His company has used IcyStudios.com since its founding, and Icy.com now forwards to the company’s website.
Prior to the acquisition, Icy.com was owned by Brandforce. The archived landing page for Icy.com shows the minimum offer to inquire about Icy.com was $2 million USD. I asked Louis Pickthall, Co-Founder and Vice President of BrandForce, if he could share the sale price for this domain name, but he was unable to do so. He did confirm that he brokered the sale of this domain name.
If you’ve been fortunate to spend time traveling to other countries, you’ll quickly learn that .com is less important to businesses in some countries. In European countries, local businesses tend to use their own ccTLD extensions. I’ve enjoyed visits to many countries in Europe, and while the biggest – global brands or brands with global aspirations – use .com, the smaller businesses frequently use their local extension.
I was recently doing some outbound marketing on a two word .com domain name. There were numerous businesses that incorporated these two words in their brands, and one operated on the .com.au extension. I thought this Australian company might have an interest in my .com domain name to show its global reach. I was wrong. The CEO of the company told me there was no interest in acquiring my domain name:
