Welcome to Domain Movers. We keep track of company focused domain name transactions and report these early findings to you. The following is a tiny sample of daily domain name transactions by companies around the world.
Animoji.com has been acquired by a currently unknown MarkMonitor client. The domain name moved into whois privacy in late October 2017 at GoDaddy and has since transferred into MarkMonitor. Animoji is an animated emoji used on the iPhone X with Apple owning the Animoji trademark, once owned by Emonster KK which was filed on September 12, 2017. There was a TM owned by Emonster Inc. that was filed in 2014 that has since been canceled. Apple filed its own TM for Animoji on November 6, 2017. Emonster sued Apple due to its 2014 TM, and since the September 12, 2017 TM is now owned by Apple, I’d have to assume that Apple purchased the TM.
Apple is mainly a CSC Corporate Domains client, so it’s not clear cut that Apple were the buyers of Animoji.com but Apple does have a couple hundred domain names at MarkMonitor, with most being all new gTLD’s but a handful of .com domains.
If I had to guess, Apple Inc. were the likely buyers of the Animoji.com domain, which has been registered since July 15, 2013.
Island.com which was owned by The Nasdaq Stock Market, Inc. has transferred ownership to Finlead AG according to whois records and transferred out of MarkMonitor to Uniregistry. The Nasdaq Stock Market owns about 1,000 domain name assets and based on DomainIQ.com data, island.com was one of the top 4 most valuable domains owned by the company. Nasdaq.com, NPM.com and Shareholder.com are the others with > $100,000 estibot appraisals, with island.com coming in at an estimated $569,393. Island.com has been registered since June 1, 1994. Nasdaq took ownership of the domain name from Instinet, Inc. which it acquired in 2005.
FlexWheels vehicle subscription service has acquired FlexMotors.com with the transaction taking place via Sedo.
CoinBase, Inc. likely registered a slew (about 100) of CoinBase related domain names via MarkMonitor using generic whois data. The company uses MarkMonitor. Some domains were CoinBaseMatching.com, CoinBasePayments.com, CoinBaseRelay.com, CoinBaseStableCoin.com and many more.
FBSonar.com, .io, .net and .org were registered at MarkMonitor under generic whois data. I’d guess Facebook was behind this.
Netflix, Inc. registered the domain name SelectYourSide.com, adding to the 1,000 other domain names owned by the company.
Facebook Inc. which acquired single letter i.org in 2015 that I wrote about on TheDomains.com here, has oddly transferred out of brand protection service MarkMonitor to a registrar called RegistrarSafe.com/RegistrarSec.com (RegistrarSafe, LLC / RegistrarSEC, LLC) which is a domain name registrar that is a subsidiary of Facebook, Inc. I didn’t know that Facebook owned a registrar. DomainNameWire.com wrote about it in April 2016. Since i.org transferred into it, this may hint at something more than for the Facebook registrar than a potential acquihire as mentioned in the DNW article.
Isn’t FInlead a domainer?
Nice find re island.com Jamie, what a fantastic name. Probably involved a long negotiation with Nasdaq.
I didn’t know Nasdaq own domain names. Something i’ll certainly be searching about in the future.
Buying a domain name from Nasdaq – that would be an interesting negotiation to see as a transcript.