OnlineDomain.com Domain Name News & Opinions
Andrew Wilkinson, the founder of MetaLab in 2006, said that he has regretted not paying $17,000 for metalab.com in 2009.
11 years later and he now owns the domain name.
This is what he shared in a tweet today:
“It took 15 years of negotiation, but we finally own http://MetaLab.com. I remember the guy who owned it told me he wanted $17,000 for it in 2009. “That’s crazy! I could buy a car for that!” I responded. Let’s just say, I should have paid up.”
MetaLab is an interface design firm headquartered in Victoria, British Columbia that provides product design, engineering, and research services. Their clients include Slack, Google, Uber, Amazon, other Fortune 500 businesses and startups. The company, founded in 2006 by Andrew Wilkinson.
They were using MetaLab.co up until the purchase of MetaLab.com. MetaLab.co now redirects to MetaLab.com.
The acquisition was completed in October and (although Andrew has not yet shared the purchase price) I have a feeling that he paid a lot more than $17,000.
The owner in 2009 was MODELS.com, Inc. from New York. (That probably also owned a company named Metalab Communications. Or the other way around…)
I am 99% sure that the seller was the 2009 owner. (Or one of the company’s owners.)
The announcement was made just an hour ago so I will update this post if the price is revealed.
OnlineDomain.com - © Copyright 2012-2024 - All Rights Reserved
Since they have been able to operate for 15 years and have clients include Slack, Google, Uber, Amazon, other Fortune 500 businesses and startups, their .co apparently works just fine and .com is not really necessary.
This may be partly true as they are not a public facing company.
But this is the wrong mentality. It is not about doing good. It is about doing the best you can. Did they really do the best they could?
The whole point is how much BETTER they could have done if they had the .com.
It is about many small things that the .com would have helped them with.
e.g. It is about the business you lost from a single email that went to the .com. About all the time your company loses explaining its email address. All the phone calls and delay from missed emails. etc.
Ha ha really,
He is really cra—! Because $17000 two months salary for the Design Engineer,s
I think they are lost many traffics, Emails, lot of customers, and nostalgia for .com last12 years,
Simply i felt that mistakes recently,
we are do business under the SAKTHIMICRO brand name (small size company and leading IT provider in our area, Domain Investor also that’s name Registered Trademark in Sri lanka) we are using SAKTHIMICRO.com from 2010,
our company name SAKTHI + MICRO,
SAKTHI have two type of spellings SAKTHI another one is SHAKTHI last one is using World widely Most people’s but I don’t purchase SHAKTHIMICRO.com until 2020 , when I purchased and redirected to SAKTHIMICRO.com main domain we got additional 30% more traffics and emails, After the analyzed and i realized my mistakes,
So
.com, keywords name domains and miss type spelling brand name domains are important for every online business
Thanks
If even the buyer himself says “I should have paid up” instead of “see folks, never needed” then you need to think again. Big time.
What were they using initially ? I doubt it was a .co back then.
It’s possible that the .co is doing fine, but they may have concerns about misdirected type-in traffic and worse: misdirected E-mail. I think the latter point is important. It’s embarrassing to have confidential information sent away to strangers.