Monte Cahn, CEO of Right of the Dot, sent me an email to let me know his firm has brokered two large domain name sales. Kick.com was sold for $276,077.45 and Cogent.com was sold for $60,029.60. I believe both of these domain names had been previously registered to New Ventures Services, Corp., which is a portfolio company associated with Web.com.
Both of these domain names are currently registered under privacy proxy, so the registrants are not known. Kick.com is registered at Network Solutions, and it has what appears to be a default registrar landing page with PPC advertising displayed. Cogent.com utilizes an Efty “for sale” landing page, so it may have been acquired by a domain investor. These two domain names were acquired by different buyers, I was told.
There are quite a few companies with “Kick” and “Cogent” in their branding, so it will be interesting to see where they ultimately end up and how they are used.
Once the $276,077 sale of Kick.com is confirmed by Ron Jackson in DNJournal, it will rank as the fourth largest publicly reported domain name sale of 2020. It will also push down by one spot the $200,000 sale of Believe.com, which I shared earlier today. The $60,000+ sale of Cogent.com will rank in the top 50 publicly reported domain name sales of the year.
For those who are curious, the reason the sale prices include decimals is because the escrow fees were paid for buy the buyers and that additional fee is included in the final sale prices.
Congratulations, Monte!
Kick.com was sold way too cheaply. Great deal for the buyer.
What if it sold to a domain investor?
Then that would make a very happy investor laughing all the way to the bank, and a very unfortunate seller making a shocking if unforced mistake.
The seller of both of these domain names is one of the largest domain industry companies – Web.com. The company owns one of the largest privately held domain portfolios and it has considerable domain industry intelligence.
Put simply, I do not think this was some sort of “unforced mistake.”
Oh puh-leaze, Elliot. Obviously that changes the equation. If it was Web.com then we have an example of a domain being sold cheap by a company in a position to do that and probably just preferring an amount like that now vs. holding out for real value.
It does *not* indicate any “domain industry intelligence” by any stretch of the imagination, friend-of-the-establishment imagination or otherwise.
And I’m inclined to think you know all that. This was not a good ass whooping by you this time, and whoever bought that is still laughing all the way to the bank on that one.
As I wrote, “I believe both of these domain names had been previously registered to New Ventures Services, Corp., which is a portfolio company associated with Web.com.”
Anyway, I have nothing more to add and have no interest in debating you about another company’s sales. I was simply pointing out that this was almost certainly not an “unforced mistake” as you suggested. High value domain names are not super liquid, and sometimes companies sell for less than optimal prices for many reasons. I have probably undersold names, but I have always used the funds to improve and grow my business.
For what it is worth, I agree the sale of Kick.com was not exceptional and have not said otherwise nor did I editorialize in the article. In fact, I offered a substantial amount of money to buy Kick.com several months ago. I also made a substantial offer to buy Cogent.com and Gilroy.com. I ended up buying Gilroy.com at NameJet last week for less than what I offered for that individual name.
I’m not saying it was a terrible sale, or that the seller was tricked into under-selling. I’m sure they had their reasons for accepting. But, I can tell you from personal experience, these types of names tend to have the highest demand for startups, and had this name had a lander to inquire on over the years (I don’t think it did), would have sold for considerably more is my feeling Hindsight at this point, but just my thoughts on this deal.
Indeed.
Very low sales.
Kick.com was sold to an end user. you will see some good things coming from them soon. The Corona situation delayed their launch and plans a bit but they will be using it.
Given the considerable domain industry intel, the willingness to sell relatively low ( by others perception ) could be a signal of ….
Don’t get me started. Don’t want to go there now. 😉