Home Blog Page 47

Kicks.com Acquired by Dicks Sporting Goods

Elliot Silver
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In early February, I noticed that Kicks.com changed hands. The valuable one word .com domain name had been owned by Reflex, and transferred to a registrant called Domain Licenses Limited, which I believe is an entity that acquires and/or holds domain names on behalf of other companies.

I detected this Whois change with the help of the DomainTools Registrant Monitor.

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IBM Secures a RDNH Finding Without Asking

Elliot Silver
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A week and a half ago, I noticed a UDRP filing that appeared to be pretty egregious. A company filed a UDRP against ResourceInteractive.com and Resource.com at NAF. I think Resource.com is a 7 figure descriptive one word .com domain name. Both of those domain names have long been owned by IBM, a $225+ billion publicly traded company.

The UDRP decision was published this morning, and in an unsurprising decision, the panelist, Ivett Paulovics, ruled in favor of IBM. In addition, a Reverse Domain Name Hijacking (RDNH) finding was made. Incidentally, IBM’s counsel did not even request this finding, so it was as clear cut of an RDNH as they come.

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Perplexity CEO Wants to Buy OS.ai

Elliot Silver
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1

HubSpot Founder Dharmesh Shah announced another domain name acquisition today. Dharmesh acquired OS.ai for $150,000. He announced the acquisition and shared his rationale for buying the domain name in a post on X:

The post received numerous responses, as Dharmesh invited people to share their ultra-premium domain names, offering to give a valuation from a new Agent.ai agent that is under development.

One response to the post didn’t include a domain name to evaluate. Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, replied to Dharmesh to let him know he would like to buy OS.ai:

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Taku Launched by GMO Led by Industry Veterans

Elliot Silver
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1

This afternoon, I learned about the launch of a new registrar and marketplace brand called Taku – using Taku.com. The brand was launched by GMO Internet Group, a company that is traded publicly on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, which operates other brands that primarily operate in Asia.

The thing that caught my attention with this launch is the numerous industry veterans that have been hired in advance of the launch. Christian Voss, Claus Barche, Birgit Berger, Frank Michlick and Michael Piotrowski have spent years working in various roles at well-known domain industry companies.

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GX.com Sold for $1.2m via Sedo

Elliot Silver
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1

The second 7 figure publicly reported domain name sale of 2025 was shared by Sedo in a post on X this morning. GX.com was sold on the platform for $1,200,000 USD in a “Buy Now” deal. Because embedding X posts seems to be broken at the moment, a screenshot of the post is below:

Once this sale is recorded by DNJournal and NameBio, it will become the second largest sale of the year following the $2.2 million sale of Commerce.com. This sale matches Teleperformance’s $1.2 million acquisition of TP.com, which was reported last year. It will rank in the top 5 publicly reported two letter .com (LL.com) domain name sales in the last 5 years.

Notably, Sedo reported the sale of Double.com for $980,000.

GX.com has been registered under Whois privacy at GoDaddy – and it is still registered under Whois privacy at GoDaddy. The buyer and seller are not publicly known as of yet. There’s a pretty blank “index” page on the GX.com lander, so perhaps we will soon know how it is going to be used.

Not Chasing the Longtail of .AI

Elliot Silver
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The aftermarket for .AI domain names has grown tremendously over the last several years. A look at Namebio shows the growing annual dollar volume of sales that were publicly reported in the aftermarket.

  • 2018: $420.8k
  • 2019: $1.1m
  • 2020: $1.1m
  • 2021: $1.2m
  • 2022: $878.7k
  • 2023: $5.6m
  • 2024: $11.7m
  • 2025 YTD: $3.2m (my guess is $20m+ for the year)

These aftermarket sales figures do not take into account the number of domain names that have been hand registered by buyers for the registration fee. The .AI registry requires a 2 year registration, and the cost is approaching $100/year. By all accounts, the number of .AI registrations is also growing at a considerable rate.

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