Brand.com sold in 2013 for a reported $500,000 to brand reputation company ReputationChanger.com but by early March 2015 the website went down and the offices for the company became empty.
Andrew at DomainNameWire.com had reported that the domain Brand.com was back up for sale on 2/20/2015 and the domain was parked with DomainNameSales.com on March 11, 2015 .
A very in-depth article also appears on March 11, 2015 about Brand.com and the things the writer found while visiting the empty offices and speaking with former employees.
The start-up failed and the domain name asset Brand.com suddenly was put back on the market for sale, and now by mid March, it appears the domain name has been sold?
Whois records for Brand.com changed on March 17, 2015 coming out of privacy protection at GoDaddy and switching to Igloo Limited, who is a domain name brokerage service and does offer services on DomainNameSales.com where the domain was listed for sale… The email address [email protected] in whois likely indicates that the domain has sold.
I did reached out to Tessa Holcomb, Co-Founder and CEO of Igloo.com in several forms to see if she was able to share any details on the Brand.com domain but I haven’t heard back at time of publishing.
Update: I did hear back from Tessa and she did confirm the sale but can’t share any more details. It was an end user sale!
There is potential that Igloo.com only put the domain under exclusive contract and it didn’t sell “yet”, but then one would expect the domain to be listed for sale on Igloo.com but I couldn’t find a listing for the domain on the site. There are several domains like Panama.com, ChitChat.com, MO.com, Talent.com, Talents.com also using the “[email protected]” email address in whois currently but none of those specific domains are listed for sale on Igloo.com either.
Domain names that I did check that are listed for sale on Igloo.com, do not hold the [email protected] email address and also do not show “igloo.com” in whois in any form.
The domain does still resolve to a for sale lander on DomainNameSales.com. So there are indicators the domain may have sold, but some things also still point that it may not have sold yet. The [email protected] is a pretty strong indicator though!
One bad thing when a start-up fails, everything isn’t always rosy! Past customers get pissed off because they pay money for a service and at times can feel they didn’t get what they paid for! Maybe they feel ripped off! This leads into people talking on the internet (reviews, blog posts etc) and all this fuel gets pointed at “the brand”. In this case, the brand is a domain name and is Brand.com! Even though the domain, which is a great one, was reportedly sold for $500K in 2013, I think it lost some of its value in the process to date and will take at least a little bit of time to recover from the poor reviews and articles about the domain.
So whoever likely purchases the domain, it makes it a bit harder to clear the air about the Brand.com domain itself. This would negatively effect the domains sale price currently IMO and I would expect it to sell for a fair amount less than the reported $500K it sold for only 2 years ago. I have seen crazy stuff happen though, so one never really knows what it may sell/sold for!
Great post yet again, Jamie.