Sedo reported its weekly domain name sales that were closed via its marketplace, and the company reported the sale of Autism.Rocks for $100,000. This sale was the largest publicly reported sale of the week at Sedo, regardless of the extension.
The domain name was originally registered in August of 2014 by someone based in Florida. After the sale appears to have been completed, the domain name Whois record is currently showing a registrant based in Dubai.
I am not 100% sure, but it appears that the buyer of Autism.Rocks is also the owner of AutismRocks.com. I am basing this on the registrant’s name and phone number for both of these domain names, although the registrant address is different. I used DomainTools’ historical Whois tool to see the registrant name for AutismRocks.com prior to it going private.
If you visit Autism.Rocks right now, it looks like there is a temporary landing page. If the Autism.Rocks buyer is the owner of AutismRocks.com, it will be interesting to see if they rebrand their website to Autism.Rocks. Interestingly, Raymond Hackney reported that AutismRocks.com was sold for $9,500 via Sedo in April of 2014. Assuming the buyer is the same, the cost was more than 10x the cost for the .com domain name.
$100,000 for Autism.Rocks would put this sale in the top 50 domain name sales of 2015. It would also rank it as one of the largest publicly reported new gTLD domain name sales. It surpasses the $90,000 .money domain name sale that I wrote about last week.
Interestingly, I checked out the seller’s website (found by using the Whois information), and it references a relationship with an organization called We Rock for Autism. This autism organization appears to be totally unrelated to Autism Rocks. My guess is the seller had bought Autism.Rocks for We Rock for Autism, and he later agreed to sell the domain name for $100,000. I will reach out to the seller to see if he can share any more information.
Update: The seller of Autism.Rocks commented about the sale.
dont believe this sale is real
lotta gaming going on in the new G’s
I don’t understand why you don’t believe it.
It is unreasonable that an asset with zero market pedigree or track record goes from $0 yo $100,000 so fast. MAYBE [and this is a BIG maybe] if the G was wholly by its own design superlative and unique in its superlativeness like law.lawyer or doc.med or media.consulting. BUT,…autism.rocks for 100k? Sorry,..doesnt pass the smell test as a real sale. I think alotta games are being played by people with interests in giving the impression these G’s are viable. This sale makes about as much sense as condoms in a nunnery.
I am around domain names all day long, and the sale, while anomalous in nature, does not appear to be suspicious to me.
@spencer this is about a guy with a lot of money (sanjay( putting up 100k for the domain as basically a donation. the seller also apparently has an autism non profit.
@jz – that makes sense.
I guess maybe my statement that the sale ‘wasnt real’ was probably a poor choice of words.
Just didnt see the sale as a likely true organic sale [need,want, desire]. My initial thought was another mainly marketing effort sale a’la coffee.club
Raise your hand if you remember the beauty.cc sale for $1 million dollars. Oh, it was huge, huge news. CC was gonna be it, the next .com. Like every new tld is.
Except, it was all a sham. The actors in this space weren’t as sophisticated back then and it unraveled sooner than later.
Read the follow up article with comments for the seller, and I think you will see that this deal was real
https://www.domaininvesting.com/autism-rocks-seller-comments-on-100k-sale/
Excited to see the big sale of another new gTLD. Great name for a good cause and charity. Congratulations to the buyer and seller.
Spencer is spot on, lots of gaming going on and this one like many other new G’s doesn’t pass the smell test. Buyer beware.
I think you guys are wrong, and I will be publishing comments from the seller very soon.
Great news for .rocks owners. I’m a big fan of .rocks names.
🙂
I like http://www.TeamSilver.Rocks
I like it too 🙂
The seller shared some info about the sale: https://www.domaininvesting.com/autism-rocks-seller-comments-on-100k-sale/
Great news for those of us who are selling new gtlds, but this sales seems a bit over the top. $100K is a heck of a lot of cash for a .rocks or any other new domain.
However, if the buyer wants another one I’ll sell autism.tools for quite a bit less.
Sounds slippery to me. Perhaps creating a higher value for the donation for tax purposes.