Welcome! Domain Movers is an exciting series on DotWeekly that keeps track of company related domain name transactions and reports these early findings to you.
Here is just a small sampling of recent domain names acquired by companies around the world for new brands, products, services, domain upgrades and more:
NBC Universal Media, LLC has acquired WatchBack.com from HugeDomains which has been registered since 2011. The domain held a buy now of $2,395 at the time of the purchase, a great deal!
Katch.com LLC has listed a bunch of domain names for sale on Afternic, which can be viewed here. I looked into the portfolio of the company and a premium generic domain owned by Katch was Contractor.com, which moved into Escrow.com in August 2017 and has a coming soon page with Elite Management and Consultancy LTD listed as the copyright. So they sold that asset already.
HealthPlans.com was another domain owned by Katch and appears to have sold to QuoteLab, Inc. which appears to be sometime between April 2017 & November 2017. It appears they sold Annuities.org via Afternic in February 2018.
Bell Helicopter is rebranding simply as “Bell” and failed IMO, because they didn’t acquire Bell.com from Verizon. Going forward, the company stated: “the company’s website will be found at bellflight.com, and its social media handles are @bellflight.”
Bell Helicopter Textron Inc., of Hurst Texas felt that the BellFlight.com hand registered domain name was the best it was willing to do and hand registered it at Network Solutions on December 14, 2017. Branding as one thing and having your important email communication and web identity as another is a problem! Why? It creates confusion (people simply assume, big company = exact match .com domain as they are branded as) not only in web traffic/email but it also opens up the “Bell” term to be launched by another company with Bell.com and potentially force another rebrand due to confusion and being lost in the mix of the Bell term online. One that is pretty dominated by Bell Canada, the telecommunications company on Bell.ca. Not to mention Bell Helmets, Bell Bank and thousands more.
If I was Bell.ca, I’d push really hard to secure Bell.com from Verizon (who uses the domain to pay heritage to the Bell telephone company Regional Bell Operating Companies.
Although Bell “Helicopters” is restrictive branding, as the company offers more than helicopters, branding simply as “Bell” creates further confusion IMO due to the vast amount of other companies branded as “Bell”. If you are going to brand as Bell, you better darn well own Bell.com! I don’t get this rebrand really! Now they will spend vast amounts branding the “flight” part of Bell and it just creates confusion from the nearly 60 year old Bell Helicopters brand.
Bell is owned by Textron Inc. and they do the right thing and are Textron.com.
Apple Inc. secured News-Publisher.com on the drop at Snapnames for $79, in a likely brand protection move for its Apple News Publisher. NewsPublisher.com is for sale and owned by Name Administration Inc. with a buy now price of $130,000.
SBTP Group Ltd. of the UK has acquired its exact match .com domain name SBTP.com at domain name aftermarket service Sedo from its past owners for $2,800 EUR.
Enable Labs has acquired Groupable.com with the transaction taking place at Escrow.com for an undisclosed amount.
Gatehouse Media, LLC has acquired DuckSports.com from BuyDomains.com for a currently unknown price.
Owning.com has been acquired by HomeHome, Inc. using Escrow.com to make the domain name purchase. The domain name was owned by Name Administration Inc. prior. I wasn’t able to find a sales price but I’d expect it to be high five figures, if not lower six figures based on many of NAI’s asking prices and sales.
Goetze’s Candy Co., Inc. acquired BullsEyes.com also from NAI and likely used the buy now via AfternicDLS as the domain transferred right away to Network Solutions. I wasn’t able to find the offering price, but I’d guess around $30K. The company uses a couple exact match .com domains on its website for other candies they offer, CowTales.com and CaramelCreams.com that I had seen. The Caramel Creams are also called Bull’s Eyes.
One bad thing I noticed (really bad thing actually), the companies main website via GoetzeCandy.com does not resolve correctly without www. added (resolves to a Network Solutions parking page, resolving Goetze Candy ad links and NSI is raking in the $$ from those ads! Pretty sad really that NSI would do that, instead of trying to help its customer by mentioning the CNAME record adjustment) It does resolve correctly with www.GoetzeCandy.com but I really hate seeing these small errors that can really hurt a small business. I contacted the company to inform them of the redirect error and how to fix it. Shame on Network Solutions for putting up a parking page, displaying the companies ads on the non-resolving domain without the www. as seen below!
TrySB.com has been acquired by a currently unknown MarkMonitor client. The domain name held an offering price of $10,000.
Pack’d House Productions has acquired PackedHouse.com out of GoDaddy’s NameFind portfolio. I wasn’t able to find a sales price on this one.
Valvoline has acquired UltimateProtection.com from its past owners, GoDaddy. The domain was purchased out of the NameFind portfolio around November 2017, with whois information just updating now to Valvoline.
Agreed about GoetzCandy, but Network solutions never had customers interests in mind. If anything, network solution is aggressively anti customer.
interesting to see Apple spending $79 and using Snapnames to get a hyphen-domain. It seems they can not afford to buy Newspublisher.com and Newspublisher.net which are both listed at SEDO. HaHaHaaaa