OnlineDomain.com Domain Name News & Opinions
The domain name ADD.com that was just auctioned last week at the NamesCon 2020 domain auction at Austin just launched with a new website.
The domain sold for $800,000 and was the top sale in the NamesCon auction.. I am surprised the website went live this fast. Not because of the website itself that was probably moved from a different domain name to add.com. I am surprised that a payment this big was completed in 3 business days although whois still shows the seller, Savvy Investments, LLC, as the current owner.
Add.com is offering health insurance with ADHD.
Meanwhile Mercury.co moved to its new domain name Mercury.com. Mercury makes bank accounts that help tech startup companies scale.
Jamie Zoch reported the sale in early December 2019:
Wowser! Mercury(.)com moves into escrow via Escrow(.)com! The domain has been registered since 1990 and was owned by Micro Focus Software Inc. (Novell, Inc.) This was a former HPE owned domain until late 2017 when Novell took ownership. Buyers are currently unknown.
— Jamie Zoch (@DotWeekly) December 9, 2019
Yesterday the company announced its move to the new domain name:
New year, new domain. We’ve moved to https://t.co/nsrK3bZCyp, added recurring payments, and made automating payments more powerful with our API: https://t.co/BfojyxUZbT pic.twitter.com/S3KBlYctNb
— Mercury (@BankMercury) February 4, 2020
Mercury.co launched in April 17, 2019 but Mercury’s CEO was eyeing the domain name mercury.com was before this launch.
Mercury’s CEO Immad described how his company acquired the mercury.com domain name on Twitter:
1/ Excited to finally announce that we are moving from http://Mercury.co to http://Mercury.com @Bankmercury!
This is the end of a 2.5 year domain acquisition story and am excited to finally have the new domain live.
2/ Mercury is the Roman God of financial gain. We loved the name and got http://Mercury.co before we even incorporated the company. At the time http://Mercury.com was redirecting to a product on the http://HP.com domain.
3/ HP had acquired Mercury Interactive in 2006 and as part of that got the http://Mercury.com domain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_Interactive @pmarca is on the board of HP and after investing in @BankMercury he helped kick off a long chain of emails to figure out who controlled the domain.
4/ It turned out that http://Mercury.com was transferred to HPE, then to Microfocus in a series of spinoffs and acquisitions. Microfocus is a $4b public UK based company. Eventually I was introduced to a very friendly person in Utah who was responsible for this domain.
5/ After a few back and forth it turned out that Microfocus didn’t want to sell the domain. They felt that there was still some name recognition for the domain (even though it didn’t point to anything) and marketing/sales there didn’t want to sell it.
6/ We stayed in contact over 2 years and finally they decided late last year that they were ready to let go of the domain. Being a startup and having a long standing relationship we quickly jumped on the opportunity and were able to close before the domain was on the open market.
7/ For many new startups getting the dot com is not important. Nowadays most people are getting to your company via mobile apps or web search where direct name hits don’t matter as much. However for us we felt getting http://Mercury.com was important because..
8/ a) Trust is crucial in banking. b) We knew the domain would be bought by someone else if we didn’t act and potentially not available again. c) We want to be a long term 50+ year company and owning the domain is part of our long term commitment. /END
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The add.com website is the original website from before the auction ended. I noticed this a few weeks Ago whilst the auction was ongoing.
So this is not the buyer’s website. Or the buyer was leasing the domain when it was auctioned at the Namescon auction and the company currently leasing the domain won it. Wonder what the reserve was and who was bidding against the auction winner.
100% not buyers website, K.
looks to be acquired wit name:
when the bid was $201K, noticed same exact website — for all we know could be a domainer who will gladly keep, accept this bonus
https://www.namepros.com/threads/is-the-bottom-in-for-3l-com.1173153/#post-7592699
It is interesting that the Mercury’s CEO encourages startup to use other domain extensions when starting out and can’t afford the .com version if costly.
In theory and for others… In practice, and in his company, his only goal for years was to get the .com.