You were right, will[.]now just sold via Spaceship! I assume that was someone reading this thread, but maybe it was a coincidence
I have far too many projects and not enough time. I think there is a great opportunity and I might circle back to it in future (I will continue to renew is.now) but at least for now, it is not the project that most excites me and I try not to hoard domains (I bias towards selling if I'm not using).
Hover's
Realnames service is interesting. I have been thinking about it recently and I am very curious about the business model. On the one hand, $35/year email accounts
could be very profitable, but there is little evidence that the email service is used much. My suspicion is that the email service essentially pays for the registration fees of the domains and it serves as a negotiating tool when selling the domains to drive the price up. I have read various reports that they sell their domains starting at around $25k (and kick off the domain's users with little notice) with conversations that start with a denial that they sell their domains.
Sure! Michael[.]now is a 12-month LTO so I don't think I can report that (yet) but I'll report chris[.]now and will[.]now which are both paid in full.
Yes, I am curious too. I am not sure how Namecheap chooses which marketplace domain to display at the top: I have `jack.now` listed but when searching "jack" on Namecheap, Namecheap returns `jack.so` which someone else has listed for $7,495 (so it's not based on lowest price).
The most common TLD for names (aside from `now`) seems to be `vip` so I think it is likely someone has followed the first name strategy with `vip` some years ago. Looking at paul[.]vip as an example, it seems to have been listed for sale for ~$3k for at least 5 years and has yet to sell.
We don't have enough information yet (I've only sold 3 of ~50 first name .now domains so far and my price is much lower than paul[.]vip) but early signs seem to show that `now` is resonating more than, say, `vip`.
