discuss Using Another Domainer’s Portfolio Against Them: Unthecial?

[Arpit131]

Here's a story that was published on TLDinvestors by Raymond Hackney.
Quoting it here as it is:

So about six months ago a reader emailed me about a domain he owned that received an unsolicited offer. He told me he could not give me the exact domain but that it was a brandable two word .com. He wanted to know how much he should counter ?

I did not know the guy so I just emailed that it was hard to give an opinion not knowing the domain name. Plus the term brandable has many different meanings to many people. He then emailed me later that he countered the offer and has been waiting for one month to get a reply.

He emailed me over the weekend to tell me he made the sale, but it is how he made the sale that interested me. Shortly after his second email he got a reply and the company told him another name they were considering. This was an obvious ploy to remind the seller to not ask for the moon because they had another fish on the hook.

So he went to Whoisology and found out what other names the competition owned. He then replied to the company that the owner of their other choice owned several perverse and pornographic domain names, he asked did they want to do business with such an individual ?

The company asked him if he could prove the statements he made and he sent them the link to Whoisology.

They completed the sale with him three days later at a price that was in the middle of both parties bid/ask price. As I did not know the domain name I cannot verify that to be true just as an fyi.

I did receive permission to tell the story as he is quite proud of this negotiation, the only request was to not use his name or email address. As I only have emails that have a first name this was no problem. I did say to him that I thought it was a bit of a dirty move. He replied “all’s fair in love and domaining”


Source

Your thoughts on this?

 

[golan]

Well.

Anyone is in his rights to buy/own/sell/deal with porn domains, or not to do it.

Anyone is in his rights to like people who own such domains and their business, or not like them.

Anyone is in his rights to gather any info from the open sources and to pass this info to any other parties. Or not.

I don't see any dirt here. All i see is a stupidity of the company. That some freaking ideas are more important to them than business.

 

[inforg]

I consider it a fair point to make to a prospective buyer under those circumstances. They obviously were concerned with it.

Years ago, I purged my portfolio of anything adult related after some negative feedback from potential buyers.

I don't consider it wrong to invest in them, but I found it to be a better business practice for me to stay away from that niche. I have a normal job in the business world, better not to have my name associated with anything controversial.

 

[guilty]

With all due respect to both parties, either the company is too stupid or the seller is too smart. Personally I think the company is stupid.

The seller's excuse didn't really make sense to me. What if a domainer has some porn domains? So what? As long as they are not sick, pedophiliac domains, I don't see anything wrong with buying a domain from that domainer.

Now moving to if what the domainer did is unethical. I would say it is not unethical. The domainer was just trying to find a way to convince the company to buy his domain.