Welcome! Domain Movers keeps track of company focused domain name transactions and reports these early findings to you. These articles put a pulse on what companies are doing for branding efforts of new brands, products, services, marketing, advertising and much more.
Domain Movers is a very helpful series that provides content for business owners, domain owners and more. Sadly, these article are under heavy attack from the new GDPR rules for EU residents but consumed the world in the process. With whois data being the main source of Domain Movers, specifically email addresses, it will drastically hurt my research tools I use.
Registrant Monitor is a fantastic offering by DomainTools.com, but, it solely relies on email addresses of the registrant. Since that data is no longer available in the majority of cases in whois records, it can’t be tracked. That is a process used for many needs, like discovering domain name theft, which is gone with the wind.
Most registrars are only displaying an organization name (not required though by the registrant) to give indication of who may own a domain name. The other tools are name servers, ip addresses and a few other methods but limiting to display who may really own a domain name.
I will be monitoring things and adjust my research strategy as best as I can, but right now, it doesn’t look like Domain Movers can continue with the GDPR changes. If it does, I would be “guessing” a lot if a domain sold or changed ownership in general. This would mainly be off of name server changes.
Wimark Systems LTD has acquired its exact match .com domain name Wimark.com at Sedo for $3,900 EUR. The transaction took place in May 2017 but whois has just updated. The wifi network management service is using the domain name as its main domain now and is based in the United Kingdom.
Tremzi.com has been acquired by a currently unknown CSC Corporate Domains client from its past owner at Afternic. The domain has been registered since 2016.
Hertz registered several “Dollar Data Breach” domain names and some “Dollar Privacy” domains. The did the same for “Firefly Car Rental Data Breach”.
Cast.com appears to have been sold. The domain name was owned by Hapag-Lloyd AG. The domain name then transferred to GoDaddy and went under whois privacy in February 2018. The domain name has now transferred to brand protection service MarkMonitor, under generic whois data.
BuzzFeed, Inc. registered several Goodful domain names. Goodful.biz .fr, .info, .name, .org, .pro and .us. Goodful.com is owned by a Chinese registrant but is currently PendingTransfer status, which means that the domain was likely acquired.
LockStars.com has been acquired by Hasbro, Inc. according to whois records. The domain name was owned by LockStars Soy Candle Company and was in use prior to changing ownership. The domain name has been registered since February 2002. LockStars.com is now redirecting to a sub-domain name, lockstars.hasbro.com which is offering a toy figure.
It appears, in April 2018, several influencer videos started on YouTube for Lock Stars. Then on May 2, 2018 Hasbro announced the collectible new brand Lock Stars.
Oxley.com has been acquired from Tucows by Brent Oxley, the founder of HostGator. Brent has been buying many great domain name assets and now owns his surname. The domain name was part of Tucows RealNames/Mailbank domain name portfolio it owns. To note, Brent had been using the domain as his email, so it’s unclear when the domain name was purchased or if he was using the RealNames service, which offers email addresses. The earliest whois history record that shows Brent as the owner, was January 25, 2018. Name servers just changed off of Mailbank and how I noticed the change of ownership now.
Character.co has been acquired by Aegis Group PTY. LTD from GoDaddy’s NameFind portfolio for an undisclosed amount.
The Domain Movers series has been a useful and entertaining resource for providing an insight into the domain strategies of big corporations. It will be a real shame if the GDPR makes this impossible to continue in some way.
I for one hope that it can continue even if in a greatly reduced form. For example, even if it only appears once a week and with less detail (but with the same level of clever insights and speculation) it would still be of great interest and benefit to the industry.
I’ve learned a lot of useful info about the brand protection companies and about the big domain portfolios. In fact, it was only by reading Domain Movers that I learned that a recent sale of mine was made to Unilever, I hadn’t known that previous!
Hence you can see the value of understanding a little bit about the strategic thinking of the brand protection companies and their use of stealth acquisition techniques.
Anyhow, thanks heaps Jamie for the DotWeekly Domain Movers series. And thanks to DomainTools too.
Thanks Dave! I should have a better idea over the coming days of what I can see with my tools, what can be adjusted and so on. I just know that email addresses have always played a big role in my research and those are now gone from whois for the most part.