Author: Doron Vermaat

There are two domains on this weeks list that jumped out because of the unusual high wholesale price they fetched at GoDaddy’s expired auctions. The first one is TheGroundwork.com, a two-word domain name that was bid up into the five-figure range. Why would any investor pay $10+k for a domain name of this caliber? A Google search shows that the domain belonged to an under-the-radar startup funded by former Google CEO and billionaire Eric Schmidt. The company was a major technology vendor for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and was supposed to help put Hillary in the White House. This obviously didn’t happen and the domain name recently lapsed.

Then there’s a very similar sale. An investor paid more than $9,000 for the expired ButterflyLabs.com domain name. Why? It was once owned by a Bitcoin mining equipment company that was shut down by the FTC and according to this article on The Verge was named “the second-most hated company in Bitcoinland“.

The question I am asking myself is why an investor would pay such a significant amount for these type of expired domains? Do they hope the backlinks and any remaining traffic on the domain will end up making them a steady parking income? Do they like to own a piece of internet history or they think an end-user that is willing to pay five-figures will come knocking for the domain and doesn’t care about the past usage of the domain?

Here’s this weeks list:

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NewHorizon.com tops the chart of last weeks brandable domain name sales. The expired domain name sold for $14,002 on GoDaddy Auctions. There is a large number of potential end-users for the domain although many companies also brand under the plural, New Horizons. The plural .com domain is a developed website from a global company offering computer training. 

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Despite the slow summer months, it was a solid week for brandable domain name sales with 3 sales reaching the five-figure range. The most interesting sale last week was that of FantasyLand.com – an expired domain name from 1997 that was dropped by Sony Pictures and auctioned at DropCatch with a winning bid of $3,251 as shared by TheDomains.com in this post. Only to be followed by the news that Sony Pictures will be turning the popular TV series from the 80’s into a feature film. It will be interesting to see if Sony Pictures will be making an effort to get the domain name they let expire back.

Here’s this weeks list: (more…)

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The big news last week was the sale of the ice.com domain name for $3.5 million dollars to the Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. Considering the company did a whopping $5.83 billion in revenues last year and immediately agreed to the asking price some might argue the domain name could have been sold for more.  The top grossing sale in brandable land was a tad more modest. It was the 4-letter okdo.com domain name which sold for $45,850 on marketplace Sedo. The domain name leads to a parked page and the Whois is private so it’s unclear who the buyer is.

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The top grossing brandable domain name sale of last week was CannaClub.com which closed at a whopping $26,722 at GoDaddy’s expired auctions. The whois for the domain name doesn’t show the new owner as of yet.

Then we have Noral.com and Osano.com. Both domain names are everything a great invented brand name needs. They are short, memorable, super easy to pronounce and very hard to misspell. They are a pleasure to say out loud and also look fantastic in writing. I absolutely love lyrical names like these. They make for terrific brands in my opinion. Although I’d say Noral.com is the better name out of these two (and also has more obvious end-users) I found it interesting to see that both domain names sold at the same price-range but Noral.com was purchased by a well-known domain name investor at NameJet and Osano.com was purchased at Sedo by an end-user as you can see from the already developed website.

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The news about the sale of the Crypto.com domain to a Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency platform, formerly known as Monaco shows that claiming the domain name you own is absolutely not for sale is a pretty good negotiation tactic if you want to sell for top dollars. It also shows that everyone has a price. Meanwhile, the brandables had another slow week without any sales in the five-figure range.

GeniusXR.com, a domain name that was only registered in February of this year sold for a cool $6,500 at Sedo. It shows that smart investors who closely follow new trends can still turn a nice profit by hand registering domains. XR stands for X Reality with the “X” representing a variable suggesting an open ecosystem that includes virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality and so on.

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