sales My.Life Domain Name Sells for $175,000

One way to see how important an expression is, is as simple as a Google search with quotation marks. Since the quotation marks restricts results to those with that precise wording, it can be helpful in deciding between alternative expressions.

Just now I tried that with "my life" - and it showed 781 million results. Google results vary with region and other browsing parameters, but that is an unusually high value. For example if I do a similar search on "more sales", a very popular expression, it gives just under 11.8 million results. "CBD treatments" only 62 thousand results.

I think another indicator that my.life is not just great but exceptional.

Bob

NickB said:

Does not mean I am going to go and buy or reg any .life domains though.....

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That isn't what its about.

New GTLDS are more likely to have value if the left of the dot and the right of the dot flow well together.

Here are other examples of that:

send.money
free.games
personal.loans

Before you ask, no I'm not some nGTLD advocate at all, but I can understand from a marketing perspective why domains like the above or my.life may have value to an end user.

pb said:

Nice domain, great sale, but there's still mylife.com... it doesn't even resolve. Unless they approached the owners first and they absolutely refused to sell, it was probably a bad decision to go after my.life first.

[edit] nvm, apparently it resolves in some countries.

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I sold All.Life to another multi-billion-dollar company,
and it took them more than a year to make a decision to buy All.com

MyLife.com has been through a couple name changes before. The information brokerage founded by Jeffrey Tinsley in 2002 started as Reunion.com. According to Wikipedia In 2007, MyLife.com received $25 million in venture funding from Oak Investment Partners. The company changed its name from Reunion.com to MyLife.com after merging with the search engine company, Wink, in the fall of 2008. According to Tinsley, the company’s 2008 revenue was estimated at 52 million dollars

Welberch said:

my.life is garbage in my opinion.

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$175,000 worth of garbage.....

In an article posted this morning @EJS adds the additional information that $100,000 has already been paid (cash) and the final instalment of $75,000 is due at end of year. So I guess even when you sell in 6-figures, instalment plans can help!

Because of the rules DNJournal use (include full cash payment has been made), as Elliot mentions, this probably means the sale will not get listed. I understand the reason for the rule, but as more and more sales happen on payment plans, I wonder if it still is as relevant.

At first I was going to mention that when someone buys a house or car it is called a sale, even if there is a mortgage or 5 years of payments on car, but I guess there is a subtle difference in that in those cases from the sellers perspective there is a sale, and it is a third party who is handling the financing, at least in most cases. Here the financing, I presume, is by the domain seller.

Bob

NickB said:

I am sure people have seen this sale and gone and looked up and regged .life names on the back of this

That is why I wrote I won't be going out and regging or buying .life domains....You have explained (probably better than I would of) why I won't, I did not write what I did to disparage the extension


Next time I will be more clear......

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You're absolutely right. People should NOT register .life domains on the back of this.

My point is this sale worked because of the two words together.

But something like loans.life wouldn't work, no matter how good the left keyword is.

Hope that makes sense.

Thanks

pb said:

Nice domain, great sale, but there's still mylife.com... it doesn't even resolve. Unless they approached the owners first and they absolutely refused to sell, it was probably a bad decision to go after my.life first.

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I have used mylife.com they are a developed website an active business so they probably had no desire to sell. Not for $175,000.

Welberch said:

my.life is garbage in my opinion.

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Nope


I think $175,000 is a fair price.

pb said:

but there's still mylife.com... it doesn't even resolve.

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Sorry this part is not correct. It resolves. It is in use by a reputation management service.
Bob

PhongSGC said:

how you know they bought All.com? You tracked them more than 1 year?

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No, I don’t need to track them to know this.
You just need to read the news, sometimes, in order to inadvertently find out about it one year later.

https://domaininvesting.com/all-com-acquired-by-accor-s-a/

UPDATE: My.Life now in use

The domain name My.Life is now in use. Contrary to some of the speculations, it is used by a new MyLife mindfulness app.To have such a high value name in use that way indicates the importance of names for apps, as well as the growing mindfulness movement.

It appears that Meredith were possibly acting on behalf of a client in the acquisition, and at least from the Los Angeles contact address, My.Life seems separate from Meredith, although was promoted via reviews in some Meredith publications. However, Meredith is still listed in the Whois for the domain name as the owner. This domain name was purchased on a two payment model (both in 2020), so the ownership may change when the final payment is made.

To further complicate things, there are several MyLife TM applications, including this one, applied for around the time of the domain acquisition announcement, by a third USA company Synapse. The TM description (currently in 1B status) reads to me a lot like the market for the app, mentioning "health and wellness, meditation and mindfulness practice, yoga and stress management."

In any case, as was the case for the $200,000 shop.app sale that Shopify put in use within weeks of purchase, it is nice to see this valuable domain name quickly employed.

Bob

Nice find Bob, Thanks for sharing.

Bob Hawkes said:

In an article posted this morning @EJS adds the additional information that $100,000 has already been paid (cash) and the final instalment of $75,000 is due at end of year. So I guess even when you sell in 6-figures, instalment plans can help!

Because of the rules DNJournal use (include full cash payment has been made), as Elliot mentions, this probably means the sale will not get listed. I understand the reason for the rule, but as more and more sales happen on payment plans, I wonder if it still is as relevant.

At first I was going to mention that when someone buys a house or car it is called a sale, even if there is a mortgage or 5 years of payments on car, but I guess there is a subtle difference in that in those cases from the sellers perspective there is a sale, and it is a third party who is handling the financing, at least in most cases. Here the financing, I presume, is by the domain seller.

Bob

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I don't agree with the value paid,

I liked the post since shared structure; fascinating, thanks!

Samer

Bob Hawkes said:

Because of the rules DNJournal use (include full cash payment has been made), as Elliot mentions, this probably means the sale will not get listed. I understand the reason for the rule, but as more and more sales happen on payment plans, I wonder if it still is as relevant.

At first I was going to mention that when someone buys a house or car it is called a sale, even if there is a mortgage or 5 years of payments on car, but I guess there is a subtle difference in that in those cases from the sellers perspective there is a sale, and it is a third party who is handling the financing, at least in most cases. Here the financing, I presume, is by the domain seller.

Bob

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Bob, I think is still correct not to report the sale until it hasn't been fully paid.
In my little experience I had a .tv that sold for 3 or 4K with installments and at half of the payment plan, the buyer stopped to pay and the domain came back to me.
I can understand that when you give 100K in advance is a little bit different, but the company can fail and not finish the payment and you would have a distorsion. Not to mention how many fake sales can be arranged if we start reporting sales before they're fully paid.

I see it this way.

I believe this was a strategic acquisition by Meredith. In 2018, Meredith acquired Time Magazine. Time Magazine owns the Life Magazine brand.

"Time Inc. has now shut down Life magazine three times. Originally launched in 1936 as a weekly, Life was suspended from regular publication in 1972 and brought back as a monthly in 1978. It was suspended again in 2000, then brought back as a newspaper supplement in 2004."

If I had to guess, Meredith may have some plans to resurrect Life Magazine. Perhaps using the url My.Life.

Just my thoughts. If I'm right, they have excellent standing to use the term My.Life with trademarks dating back to god knows when, and it would be an appropriate acquisition for them.

Welberch said:

Flowers.mobi was sold as well and what did it mean?

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I agree with others who are a little puzzled by the relevance of the comment to this thread. Yes, I guess it is 4 letters long extension, and sold for 6-figures, so that is similar. But it was not a new gTLD (at least as ICANN use the word), was an auction sale not to an end user like this one, and was sold about 14 years ago. The name is of course currently in use by an end user for redirection.

Anyway, let me answer the "what did it mean?" At the time of the sale, in 2006, a consortium of almost all the big names in tech Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, Ericsson, T-Mobile, and many others were promoting two things...

1. Mobile computing would soon become big, with people carrying a computer in their pocket.
2. Given the screen resolution and data bandwidth limitations of mobile technology of the time, the industry solution was two forms of each website. The traditional one, for computers, and a mobile-friendly one that was promoted to be on .mobi.

We all know that 1 turned out to be true and 2 did not because Apple came along with the iPhone, grabbed huge market share, and did not support the system of needing two forms of websites.

Some have been uncharitable to domain investors of that time who spent huge amounts on acquisitions of .mobi and then sold them at a big loss, in many cases. In retrospect, clearly unfortunate investments. But, at the time it appeared that .mobi would not just be as important as .com, it would be as essential as the other TLDs combined to some degree. Unfortunately to extract top dollars, or to fairly allow .mobi acquisition, depending on your viewpoint, an auction system gathered top dollars from domain investors for .mobi. I get how angry domain investors are at .mobi registry for extracting money from them.

But note why .mobi sold for so much. It was because people thought it would soon be essential to have. Flowers was a great match keyword in an important area in a TLD that seemed to be essential. But it was that second aspect that made it valuable, it was not because flowers.mobi sounded nice or powerful. In that way, the .mobi is much more similar to .com, where people say it is essential for businesses to have the .com. It is saying a domain name is worth a lot because of the TLD, neglecting any aspect of across the dot match. Nothing is certain in the world of domain investing. That is the big message of .mobi.

But what happened in the my.life sale? An end user bought this domain name because the expression was elegant, powerful and useful. It was the usefulness of the expression, the beautiful match across the dot, that mattered, not some assumption about how .life would work out or what others would do or about what others would do.

Finally let me address anyone thinking of going out and stocking up on .life or domain names with word my. It is your money, but personally I don't see that this is about MyZZZ domains having new popularity or that .life TLD domain names suddenly have more value. Rather, the message here is simply that great expressions, matches across the dot, have value.

But similarity to .mobi? Yes 4 letter extension selling for 6 figures, and only 14 years apart. There is that similarity, and not much more, in my opinion.

Bob

PS The Wikipedia entry on the .mobi TLD has the key information in a concise format.

Flowers.mobi was sold as well and what did it mean?

Nice domain, great sale, but there's still mylife.com... it doesn't even resolve. Unless they approached the owners first and they absolutely refused to sell, it was probably a bad decision to go after my.life first.

[edit] nvm, apparently it resolves in some countries.

Bob Hawkes said:

Sorry this part is not correct. It resolves. It is in use by a reputation management service.
Bob

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Ok then, maybe it's a geo thing, but I tried on different devices and it doesn't resolve for me.

pb said:

Ok then, maybe it's a geo thing, but I tried on different devices and it doesn't resolve for me.

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It does load a little slowly (I am in Canada, so it at least goes outside USA), on first access, for me. They are based out of Los Angeles and claim a US patent on their process. As I understand it they use public online records, social media, criminal, etc. to build a reputation profile for you, and then assign a score. Although memberships allow you to help rebuild your reputation by adding reviews, it is not a traditional name reputation firm.

I would love to know what the .com sold for, but not in NameBio. It was created in 1997. Would be interested to know if they were approached about selling their name. Edit: It sounds from information on scale and history of company provided by @equity78 below that they definitely would not be open to possible sale, at least in this price range.

I also had a quick look at MyLife TESS records, a fair number of live and dead in various use categories, not surprising for such a common and versatile phrase.

Bob

equity78 said:

Show attachment 151456

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You missed the best part!



Let's see if "My.Life" comes close to .com counterpart

Samer

shahbaz0345 said:

What a luck 3 yaers ago I was getting My.life domain name for $80 but i left it because if. Life domain. I wish I would take it.

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Donuts didn't reserve lots of keywords but they did reserve "my" so if you saw it available at some registrar it was a mistake and you wouldn't actually get the domain even if you went through with the purchase.