Dynadot

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

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This morning the Premium Domains division of Donuts confirmed the sale of the domain name My.Life for $175,000. I had reached out to them a few days ago, after rumours of the sale first emerged on NamePros.

If, or when, the sale is listed on NameBio, it would become by far the highest .life extension sale in the public record. The sale is the 17th highest new extension domain name sale of all time, at least for those sales with confirmed prices.

This is the third 6-figure new extension domain name sale with a revealed price so far in 2020. That is more than in all of last year. The other two sales were shop.app at $200,000 and live.chat at $125,000.

NamePros member New.Life had first suggested on NamePros that My.Life had sold based on WhoIs records. He also pointed out that the name had recently been listed with a $200,000 price tag.

As was the case in the recent acquisition of shop.app by Shopify, the purchaser in this case is also a huge business. It appears to be Meredith, a media and marketing services company. They are publishers of such well known brands as People, Better Homes & Gardens, and InStyle, along with many more.

The domain name did not resolve at the time of writing, and it is not yet known whether Meredith plan to use My.Life directly, or if they acquired it on behalf of a client.

As FolioTeam wrote “I love the simplicity and the aptness of the name.” Grego85 added “I hope the buyer does something really cool with it. The name has great potential.” I definitely agree. This is surely one of the most powerful domain name phrases. It will be interesting to see how Meredith use this stellar domain name.

As major businesses recognize the value of powerful digital assets, there is a positive impact on the entire domain name industry. I believe because the Meredith publications and Shopify are well known to consumers, there could potentially be significant improvements in acceptance of new extension domain names.
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
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

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.
 
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Flowers.mobi was sold as well and what did it mean?
That's a great question. But what does it have to do with this sale?? The only thing I can think of that makes a great partner with mobi is someone named dick, but even then it's still backwards and a typo to boot..
 
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thank you bob for great post and finding
 
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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

how you know they bought All.com? You tracked them more than 1 year?
 
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I don't have any .life domain in my Portfolio. And I don't think i will register .life at present.
 
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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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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.
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.
 
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Thanks for the article Bob. Great sale for the domainer...it will be interesting to see what comes of the domain.

Re the .com version...I'm not a big fan...in my case the data is miserably incorrect.
 
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Thanks, but just to clarify this was a premium sale by the registry.

LOL...thanks for pointing it out to me. My best friend (dog) was destroying a 50 pound bag of dog food I failed to put out of reach and I had to jump up to rescue it (the bag)...must have missed a paragraph or two!?!?!
 
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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.
 
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Good to learn some tricks to track some end-user though. Nice one.
 
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im shocked that shop.app sold for the highest price of the three. imo its the worst of the three, but who am i to judge lol
 
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im shocked that shop.app sold for the highest price of the three. imo its the worst of the three, but who am i to judge lol

It's "Shopify man!" "it's Shopify"

What's a Shopify, again?

Samer
 
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Thank you for the article, I got Lift.Life and I think it's good domain for targeting charity and philanthropist niches and helping out world's poverties by lifting their lives. (y)
 
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Flowers.mobi was sold as well and what did it mean?
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.
 
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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.

free.games sold for $335,000

makes me wonder what I can get for e.credit and easy.credit
 
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free.games sold for $335,000

makes me wonder what I can get for e.credit and easy.credit

easy.credit is the exact sort of name I am on about, and I can see why someone would spend a good amount on that for sure. Nice one!
 
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GD appraisal:
upload_2020-4-21_16-0-22.png
 
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Bohdan it’s impossible to evaluate GTLDs at the current moment and most appraisal tools are off for domains anyways - both in TLDs and GTLDs ... I would say the best tool out there right now for evaluating a domains value is “Estibot”
 
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Bohdan it’s impossible to evaluate GTLDs at the current moment and most appraisal tools are off for domains anyways - both in TLDs and GTLDs ... I would say the best tool out there right now for evaluating a domains value is “Estibot”
Just was curious. Some end-users speculate on those appraisals. So now we have strong counterarguments for them :)
 
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