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Kickstart Acquires Kickstart.com

Rob Schutz, who made an Ask Me Anything appearance with the ICA yesterday, announced the Kickstart.com domain name was acquired by a company called Kickstart. Prior to the acquisition, Kickstart had been using KickstartFund.com, and that domain name now forwards to the brand matching Kickstart.com.

In Rob’s post, he mentioned that he worked with Andrew Rosener on the sale. Rob’s Snagged.com represented the buyer, but he was unable to share the sale price with me when I asked.

Although the acquisition price was not revealed, it looks like it held a $499,000 price tag on GoDaddy. The listing was still active this morning, so the former owner should have that listing removed. In looking at Archive.org, the Kickstart.com domain name has been priced around that level since at least 2020.

Acquiring Kickstart.com was a wise move for Kickstart. In fact, there is hardly ever a time that acquiring a brand matching .com domain name isn’t a great decision for a business that has the funds to do so.

I added Kickstart to the list of companies that upgraded its domain name. Perhaps the acquisition price will be shared at some point.

Instacart was Buyer of Fizz.com

A little over a month ago, I noticed the Fizz.com domain name appeared to have changed hands. Fizz.com, which had been owned by Digimedia, transferred from Tucows to Amazon’s domain registrar with Whois privacy enabled. I noticed this with the help of the Nameserver Monitor tool at DomainTools:

2026 ICA Meeting Date Set

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The Internet Commerce Association shared the dates for its 2026 member meeting in Las Vegas during its AMA session with Rob Schutz from Snagged. The annual members only meeting will be held January 15-17, 2026. This is directly after Affiliate Summit for those who wish to attend both. The meeting will take place at the Park MGM hotel and resort in Las Vegas.

eco to Host Webinar for Global Domain Report 2025

InterNetX annually publishes its Global Domain Report with an extensive overview of the domain name aftermarket, highlighting sales stats and ongoing trends. An organization called eco – Association of the Internet Industry, will be hosting a webinar to discuss this year’s Global Domain Report.

The Global Domain Report 2025 webinar will take place on Wednesday, May 8th at 11am Eastern time (17:00 CEST). Leading the webinar will be Semra Körner and Simone Catania. The webinar is open to the public, and there is no cost to attend. I am told the webinar shouldn’t be more than an hour in length. Here are some of the topics of discussion, pulled from the eco website:

Anyone.com Domain Name was Acquired for $400k

Reza Sardeha founded Dan.com before selling the company to GoDaddy for more than $71 million before the company was integrated and retired. Instead of taking the money and retiring, Reza launched a new home sales platform called Anyone. The popular real estate publication Inman published an article about the launch yesterday.

As you may have guessed, Reza launched Anyone on the brand matching Anyone.com domain name. Yesterday afternoon on X, Reza revealed the price his company paid to acquire Anyone.com – $400,000 USD:

GoDaddy to Retire SmartName This Month

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In 2013, GoDaddy acquired Afternic and SmartName. SmartName is a domain name monetization platform founded by Larry Fischer and Ari Goldberger. SmartName has continued to operate post-acquisition, and I use it to monetize some of my domain names that perform better there than elsewhere.

When I logged into my SmartName account yesterday afternoon, I noticed a message informing customers that SmartName is going to be retired later on this month. Accounts will be migrated to GoDaddy’s CashParking service, a similar type of domain name monetization platform.