Company pays up after playing dirty in domain name negotiation.
This week’s DNJournal sales report includes a $175,000 sale of LGG.com.
When reviewing the report, I instantly knew this domain name was familiar. Sure enough, I’ve written about it before.
The company that just bought the domain name, a Finnish dairy company called Valio Ltd, filed a UDRP against Telepathy (owned by domain investor Nat Cohen) last year in an effort to get the domain name.
Telepathy prevailed in the case. So Valio returned to the negotiating table to try to secure the domain name.
The details of the UDRP show that Valio offered $10,000 for the domain name and that Cohen asked $175,000. Now Valio has paid the full asking price.
You might think to yourself “Hey, shouldn’t the price go up because Valio played dirty?”
Although I don’t know all of the details here, I suspect it did go up in price. If $175,000 was the starting offer, then I suspect Valio could have negotiated down a bit. But that was before it decided to file a frivolous UDRP. So in the end, filing the UDRP cost the company more than if it had played fair in negotiating for the domain name.
Great find.
Well done Nat!
Aron
Congrats Nat!
3 letter Dot Com had an excellent 2013 to nobody’s surprise.
Cheers.
Karma
“You might think to yourself “Hey, shouldn’t the price go up because Valio played dirty?”
I don’t think that.
I think the saying “pigs get fat hogs get slaughtered” applies here. Or is it “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth”.
When you have someone against the wall the last thing you want to do is give them a reason to cut their nose to spite their face. In the case of a domain like lgg.com we are not talking about a name that has a big market of companies that will pay 6 figures. Try to hard you loose the money and you sit on the domain forever.
I know people in the domain business love to talk about these outlier situations with selling domains but what you never hear is the ones that get away. Only the ones that sell.
Nat played this one well judging by the end result of course.
@Larry said:
“In the case of a domain like lgg.com we are not talking about a name that has a big market of companies that will pay 6 figures. Try to hard you loose the money and you sit on the domain forever.”
Who told you there is no big market of companies that are paying, or would pay 6 figures (and even more) for domains like LGG.com ?
Not sure how knowledgeable you are about the domain aftermarket. Cgm.com sold for $365k back in 2010 and Qnb.com sold for $1M in 2014, to mention a few.
Especially with the rise of Chinese companies paying attractive mid six figures and up—for LLLs without vowels, I think Cohen would’ve sold the same domain now easily for double what he asked for, then.
Though its been more than 2yrs since your comment was made, I wonder if your view regarding premium domain chips like lgg.com have changed or still limited.
I’m sure Rick Schwartz would’ve patiently sold same domain for more.