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Spending $40k on a Domain Name to Eliminate Friction

There are many reasons for why a company will drop a chunk of change on a domain name. The Founder of an AI sales tool called ZipChat shared that his company spent $40,000 to acquire ZipChat.com in order to eliminate friction. The business uses ZipChat.ai for its website.

Obviously, I think this domain name acquisition was smart.

Verisign: .Web Domain Names Coming This Year

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It’s been quite a long time since we’ve heard anything about .web domain names. Nearly 10 years ago, Verisign, via a company call Nu Dot Co, won the auction for the .web extension, as noted by the BBC. For quite some time, there were legal battles related to the auction. Wikipedia has a page with some background about .web.

It appears that .web domain names will finally be coming to market this year, according to a press release from Verisign that was published last night. The two most notable sentences in the press release were:

Runway.com Acquired by Runway AI via ATM Holdings

Runway.com has been acquired in a deal overseen by Andrew Miller of ATM Holdings. The domain name recently transferred from Tucows to Namecheap under Whois privacy. Runway.com had been listed for sale on the ATM Holdings website, and it was recently moved to the section on the homepage showcasing completed deals.

I reached out to Andrew to see if he could share any details about the transaction. “I can confirm that we (Andrew Miller and ATM Holdings) oversaw an amazing win-win transaction for the buyer and seller,” Andrew told me via email. He was unable to disclose the acquisition price.

Reconsidering LTO on Top Domain Names

I’ve been a proponent of offering buyers the option to lease-to-own (LTO) my domain names. The primary benefit of an LTO deal is that it enables a fledgling business to secure a domain name today while paying for it as the business grows. It’s a win win if the seller gets the desired price.

Despite a reasonably good track record with LTO deals, I’ve been opting against offering an LTO option for my highest value domain names.

Afternic Adds Renewal Note to LTO Cancelation Email

A month ago, I wrote about an issue sellers need to be aware of when using the Lease to Own (LTO) option on Afternic. If a LTO deal is canceled, the domain name is returned to the seller’s GoDaddy account with auto-renew disabled, regardless of that status prior to the sale.

This morning, one of my lease to own deals was canceled and the domain name was returned to my GoDaddy account. Despite having auto-renew enabled before the LTO started, the domain name had auto-renew disabled after it was returned to my account.

Ode with Anthropic Launched on Ode.com

Ode.com has changed hands. According to a press release issued yesterday, Ode with Anthropic, an AI services company, was launched under its new branding using the Ode.com domain name for its website. The company started out as Fractional AI before its rebrand and launch.

In the daily DomainIQ Domain Monitor email I received last night, I saw the Ode.com nameservers changed, as did the Whois registration. The domain name has long been owned by a domain investment company, and the nameservers changed to AWS. Ode.com did not transfer out of Namecheap, but the Whois record for the domain name is now private.