Kraft Gives a Nice Glimpse of Why Marketing Names Have Good Value

One of the first questions I ask myself when evaluating a name is "Would this name help a company make money?"  It's a pretty open ended question but it's a good place to start. A look at the names Kraft Foods has acquired over the years is a great example of the types of names that large corporations are looking to acquire.  A combination of generics, brands, and marketing names.  Here is a sample of some of the generics and marketing names they own BestFreeBaseball.com  (must have been a marketing campaign for their yogurt) 2MuchFun.com CheeseMania.com ChowProudly.com Churny.com ... Read More »

Will A “Good Samaritan” Cost Godaddy Auctions Millions?

I received an email from someone with an interesting plan.  It stated he/she was going to notify "All" dot com owners with expiring domains that their domain was about to expire and be possibly be sold for a million dollars.   I thought it was a joke, and it might be, but whoever it is had thought the plan out.   He/she said they already scraped the expiring domains to create their own sheets and he could easily create a script using domaintools api to send out an email to each and every one.  I asked why? They said they were tired of the big companies making millions off the "little people". ... Read More »

Dex Media, Publisher of YellowPages Is Registering Domains Of YOUR Company For Themselves

I've been doing this a while but I don't think I've ever seen a Fortune 500 company do something this shady when it comes to online presence.  Dex Media knew they were in trouble.  The millions per city that they were getting for the Yellow Pages was drying up.  It was something I was glad to see as I felt I had been taken hostage by all the Yellow pages and been charged tens of thousands of dollars for spots I really had no choice but to buy. If you wanted to be found you had to be in the book....and stand out which of course cost even more. But along comes the Internet and I don't need them anymore... Read More »

Happens Every Day: Guy Buys Two Domains From Me on Sedo for $1400 and Lets Them Expire

Things like this don't surprise me any more but I still have to shake my head. I was doing my daily run through of the expiring auctions at Godaddy and noticed two domains that looked familiar. Wuby and Vuby.com. They were two names that I sold at auction to the same person on Sedo in 2010.   Evidently he lost track of his purchases and forgot to renew them at which Godaddy takes over and puts them up for auction. I actually could care less that they expired except for one thing. Vuby.com sold for more than twice what I sold it for.     Nobody likes to see names the... Read More »