It’s been a great weekend, and I hope you enjoyed yours as well. I have a few emails queued up for the week already, so I can’t wait until tomorrow morning to get back to business.
Here are a few domain industry updates and thoughts. Your thoughts and updates are welcome in the comment section if you have something to contribute:
I am surprised ContinentalAirlines.com and ContinentalAir.com expired and went to auction at NameJet. I know that Continental Airlines merged with United a few years ago, but it still seems peculiar that these two domain names expired. IMO, they were worth at least the reg fee for the airline and probably much more.
I was even more surprised that Medtronic let a few keyword (unbranded) domain names expire that also went to auction at NameJet. The three auctions I was tracking grossed 5 figures, so even if the domain names were no longer needed, money was left on the table (not including any fees that would have been incurred had the domain names been sold by the company).
George Kirikos continues to impress me with the information he uncovers on a regular basis. I wish George had his own domain industry blog.
I am looking forward to hearing about the domain name Mike Berkens tweeted about: “$1,111 purchase a month ago on a dropped domain just resulted in a $50K sale: not to brag but to show you can make $ on domains.” That is the beauty of this business. A slow day can quickly turn into a huge day.
It was neat to be able to share information about the domain investment business with a journalist from Boston.com. Glad he mentioned there’s a difference between domain investing and cybersquatting, as many journalists either have no clue or choose to ignore that.
It seems United forgot about all domain names once owned by Continental. I wrote about OnePass.com in my weekly brandable sales report for week 19. It also sold on Namejet and was once used by Continental as their frequent flyer program.
Perhaps United don’t know that continentalairlines.com and continentalair.com are parts of the asset bought.
I agree with you on ContinentalAirlines.com and ContinentalAir.com and even SI.com Elliot…is it really that much of an expense to renew the names in perpetuity @ ~$10/year?
$10 to keep the names out of other people’s hands seems like good, cheap insurance