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information Top Topics: Connect.com Acquired for $10 Million; What Happened With .ORG and .CO?...

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In this week's Top Topics, we feature the news of this year's second eight-figure sale, a domainer shares some analysis of domain names used by Y Combinator startups and do .ORG and .CO perform well for you?


Connect.com Acquired for $10 Million

The major news in the domain industry this week has been the revelation of Connect.com’s sales price. The ultra-premium domain changed hands earlier this year in a deal brokered by Louis Pickthall of Brandforce. The domain’s new owner is HubSpot, a publicly traded CRM software creator.

Thanks to its status as a publicly traded company, HubSpot has an obligation to file financial reports with the SEC. In a recent filing, investor George Kirikos discovered that the company disclosed its purchase price for Connect.com. The price paid was $10 million, one of the largest publicly disclosed sums ever reported for a domain name.

Topic by: @GeorgeK


Y Combinator Analysis

Leading startup accelerator Y Combinator has been involved in the early days of some of this generation’s most influential and iconic companies. From Stripe to Reddit, Y Combinator has helped fund and guide thousands of startups.

Every year, Y Combinator accepts two new batches of startups to its incubator program. From a domain perspective, the choice of domain used by startups in Y Combinator can help investors understand the type of domains and extensions that are currently popular. With that in mind, an investor has compiled a whole host of domain data from Y Combinator’s two most recent batches. Useful data for domainers.

Topic by: @narbuq


Call.com Sells for $1.6 Million

The top end of the domain market has been highly active in recent months, and this latest one-word .com sale is representative of that. Marketplace Sedo is responsible for the sale of Call.com, with broker Frank Tillmans reporting that the name sold for $1.6 million.

Call.com previously sold for $1.1 million in 2009. This time around, the domain was acquired by a currently unknown entity in Oslo, Norway. In this discussion, domain investors are reacting to the news of this sale.

Topic by: @silentg


What Happened With .ORG and .CO?

Sales of alternative domain extensions often have peaks and troughs, with some extensions favored by end users for a while before being replaced with another trending extension. The .XYZ extension, for example, is currently popular among Web3 companies in particular, but those sales may dip at some point.

Have sales of .CO and .ORG already dropped? In this investor's experience, these two extensions have performed poorly over the past couple of years. Have you found that your .ORG and .CO names have been sitting on the shelf for years?

Topic by: @twiki


Top Topics of the Week is a blog series featuring the most popular discussions and content within the domain community. Tune in weekly to see what's trending
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
Even the best .Com domains "sit on the shelf", i.e., are not "sold" to an enduser for a newsworthy sum, for years, even decades. They "collect dust" until an enduser with a vision, a well crafted business plan including a well crafted domain use case . . - AND the necessary funds - goes after that domain. Then, ~suddenly, a domain that has been collecting dust begets an extraordinary sale resulting in news stories.

So, is it proof that sales of .Com domains have performed poorly, since - in any given year - only small percentage of the top tier .Coms are reported as sold?

As far as .Org sales, if you aren't finding any buyers, odds are it has more to do with the quality of the domains or pricing, sometimes bound up with the difficulty of some .Organizations rationalizing paying "extra" for a domain that would be well-suited to their branding, marketing and/or self-promotional strategy.

Sometimes, ironically, such organizations spend hundred$ of thousand$ of dollar$ (or even million$) on messaging their brand or identity. Yet, the same Organization may have difficulty spending a smaller sum on a one time domain-as-message acquisition. A domain that in the long run may save the entity million$ in branding, messaging, etc.

Sometimes the person making the decision to not acquire a better web address or "calling card" for such an .Organzation is him-or-herself compensated in the hundred$ of thousand$ of dollars and has no problem rationalizing that expeniture of a non-profits funds. Such an attitude or POV begs the question: Wouldn't a better messaging domain work as hard - year after year - promoting a non-proft as a CEO that claims an annual $$$,$$$ salary?

Wilderness.org? Nature.org? Clean.org?

C'est la vie.

FWIW, based on my own experience, it's likely there are more significant .Org sales that go unreported than there are significant .Com sales that go unreported. It's not too hard to reason-out why that is (likely) the case.

FWIW, it's rare, very rare, that I publish .Org sales info. What good does it do me to do otherwise? I imagine Elliot Silver holds a similar philosophy about reporting his .Com sales. Perhaps the day Elliot closes a $MM sale that will be the exception . . and, in that case, the rationale may include the buyer seeing some benefit from the publicity related to the sale.

For some, any publicity is good publicity.

For others publicity is . . "Meh".
 
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