I’m super excited to share with you this in-depth interview with DnGeek and Efty founder, Doron Vermaat. In this episode Doron reveals his secret formula for selling brandables in alternative extensions. Then, Doron and I discuss his Top Ten end-user sales of the year!
Don’t miss it!
(more…)It’s no secret that my money is on .com domains. It’s the only generic top-level domain that has consistently been dominating the sales charts and even with the many new TLDs that launched during the last couple of years, I do not see this changing anytime soon. There is, however, one other extension in which I have been successfully making a moderate profit (low five-figures) during the last years and that is .Co
Before .io came around, .Co easily was the most popular alternative for .com for startups and the extension has seen huge end-user adoption since it became publicly available in 2010 thanks to a very well executed and aggressive marketing push by the registry at the time. As a result, many premium, one-word .Co domains were snapped up for big bucks during the landrush auction in 2010 and despite competition from some new, cool kids on the block such as .io and .ai, .Co continues to report impressive sales in the aftermarket.
The most important driver for its success is the large number of startups that embraced the extension over the years and build large and successful businesses on the domains with some of them forking out a significant amount of money to acquire their .Co domain. Here are 10 of them. (more…)
Another week, another book. I just started reading Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis, a book that my former boss, who used to be a trader on the Amsterdam stock exchange, gifted me 10 years ago when we both moved to Hong Kong. I never read it. Until this week. It’s a very enjoyable and refreshing read for anyone with the slightest interest in the financial markets and investment banking. Speaking of $$$, a monstrous $674,595,590 in funding was raised by 86 startups last week. 68% of these new companies is using a .com for their address on the web, followed by the ccTLDs with 17%. There’s not a single one of the new domains on the list this week.
Some domain names I like on this week list include those of San Francisco based Joy which offers an interactive photo album that allows users to curate and share their favorite photos with friends and family. The company uses Joy.co which I really like – I’ve said it before: a .CO can work well, especially when you have a short, brandable, dictionary word. Another domain name I like a a lot is from a company called Coworker which has build a network for discovering and reviewing co-working spaces at Coworker.com. The domain name sold for $27,500 last year via Braden Pollock’s LegalBrandMarketing. Last up we have Humada, a data protection and information security company from Palo Alto which uses the exact match Humada.com, an invented name with a nice ring to it. The domain was last offered for sale for EUR 5,900 according to an archived landing page.
Here’s this weeks list: (more…)