The DomainTools Domain Monitor tool has been an invaluable tool for me in uncovering domain name sales and transactions. I monitor tens of thousands of domain names, and when DomainTools detects a change in its Whois record, I receive an alert notifying me the following morning. The tool has been greatly impacted by GDPR and similar privacy laws, but it has continued to help discover when domain names change hands or transfer.
As you know, I am riding in the Pan-Mass Challenge to raise funds for Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. When people ask how to donate to my fundraiser, I give them the link, which is profile.pmc.org/es0223. It is easy enough to share the link via email or in a blog post, but it is not so easy when I mention the PMC ride to people in passing.
Domain investors know a complicated domain name or web link can make it difficult for people to directly navigate to a website. It is one of the biggest reasons why many major companies own domain names they use for forwarding. Customers can easily navigate to a business website with a memorable descriptive, call to action, brand match, or acronym domain name.
Earlier this year, I won CancerStinks.com in a GoDaddy expiry auction. I began forwarding the domain name to my PMC fundraising page. I am sure there was very little existing type-in traffic to the domain name, but using it for forwarding makes it easy for people to find my fundraising page when I tell them about it.
Raymond Weil is a well-known Swiss watchmaking brand. The company uses Raymond-Weil.com as the domain name for its primary website, and it also has the Raymond-Weil.us ccTLD domain name for its US-based website. The non-hyphenated RaymondWeil.com domain name had been used as a forwarder to the watchmaker’s primary website, according to Archive.org.
A publicly traded company in the insurance space formerly called Baldwin Risk Partners has rebranded itself as The Baldwin Group. The company trades under the BWIN stock ticker on NASDAQ. In advance of the rebrand, the company acquired the brand matching Baldwin.com domain name. The company currently has a market capitalization of nearly $4 Billion USD, and it employees 4,000 people. The rebrand was covered in an insurance industry trade publication last month.
From what I can tell using the Whois History tool at DomainTools, it appears that Baldwin.com changed hands in or around December of 2023. Baldwin.com had been registered under Whois privacy at Network Solutions, and it transferred to Amazon’s domain registrar, also under Whois privacy.
Dharmesh Shah is most well-known for being a Co-Founder of HubSpot. Notably to domain investors, Dharmesh has been involved in a number of high value domain name acquisitions, including Chat.com, Connect.com, You.ai, Wordplay.com, and quite a few other domain names. Dharmesh has spent tens of millions of dollars acquiring valuable domain names.
Dharmesh recently launched Agent.ai, a website that allows people to create and use AI agents to accomplish various tasks. Over the weekend on LinkedIn, Dharmesh announced that he created a domain name appraisal agent within the Agent.ai platform:
In a press release distributed this morning, Porkbun announced it hit the 2 million domain names under management milestone. The registrar was established in 2015, and it hit the 1 million mark seven years later in 2022. It is an impressive feat to have doubled that number in about two years.
Notably, Porkbun was founded as a retail registrar focused on selling non-.com domain names in extensions owned by its parent company, Top Level Design. The press release shared some of this background for those unfamiliar with Porkbun’s history:
