Domain lease expires, forcing company to switch domain names.
Kit, a service that lets influencers profit by recommending products, is about to lose the domain name it has used for years.
Patreon acquired Kit in 2018 and then sold it to GeniusLink a couple of months ago.
But the Kit.com domain wasn’t part of the transaction. In fact, Patreon didn’t own it; the original Kit founders leased it. The company explained in a message to its customers:
When we took Kit under our wings a few months ago, the fate of the Kit.com domain was not completely settled as it was owned by a third party. However, we did own Kit.co, and we knew that no matter what, we could fall back on it if needed. Unfortunately this last Thursday, November 21st, the owners of the Kit.com domain (not Patreon) informed us that they were no longer interested in selling it to us, and they were going to repurpose the domain for a different property in the very near future. We were given two weeks to prepare.
The company is moving everything to kit.co and fighting to prevent business interruptions:
Preserving your traffic and search engine presence is our top priority. We are creating redirects so that visitors to Kit.com links will be routed to the newer Kit.co addresses while we await the domain handoff. Additionally, we are working with the owners of Kit.com to hopefully maintain these redirects for some time after they assume control of the domain. However, we cannot guarantee these redirects will last forever. So, we highly recommend you update any links to your kits that you control.
I looked at the Whois history for Kit.com to see who owns it. The last public Whois record in DomainTools points to KIT Electronics Limited in London.
According to Companies House, KIT Electronics is linked to Michael Gleissnner. I can’t be sure he is still involved with the domain but he appears to have been as of 2015.
Whoever owns it might be able to profit from the years of linking activity and content on Kit.com. In all domain leasing deals, both parties should consider what their termination and purchase options are and negotiate these into the contract to prevent something like this from happening.
Hat tip: Joel Runyon
Dave L says
The lesson? Never lease a domain.
Adam says
Research your landlord. . . . dude would be bad news for any sort of business arrangement.
They may as well change their name to WrecKit.com
This will not work out well for them.
Don says
@Dave L,
No, you are very wrong and coming to an erroneous conclusion. Leasing a domain is no different than leasing a house, an apartment or an office. It depends on your landlord and their motives. I am writing you this email from my (rented) office space. If my landlord decides not to renew with me and, instead, to have his son-in-law (who is in the same line of business) take over my space, there is not much I can do.
This is not a domain leasing thing, but rather a greedy landlord thing.
John Napoletano says
You can move your house or rented office down the street, out of the state, and still maintain your online Brand. Market to your existing customers in a practical way.
When you lose your rented Brand AKA domain name you lose thousands of dollars in SEO, inbound links plus brand mentions included, and thousands of man hours that you can never get back.
Real estate based landlords provide ‘traffic’ via the location. You don’t rent in someones backyard. You rent on a busy street with visibility.
Domain lease provides very little if any such traffic on its own. You create the traffic yourself as the website operator. Marketing by PPC, SEO, social media, offline billboards, etc.
If a rental agreement doesn’t have a buy out option don’t do it!
If you don’t plan on being able to buy out the domain name after the 5 or 10 year initial lease term, should you even bother?
Nato says
someone has to come up with a stupid analogy and then the conversation goes into a stupid discussion.
A domain can be valued at millions but only costs $10 annually to own.
Unlike real estate, it’s not a done thing to “rent” a domain in third party.
Lesson learnt: never rent a domain from a third party.
snoopy1267 says
It is highly likely the business didn’t go as well as expected and they couldn’t afford to buy it. The fact that the business has been sold a couple of times recently suggests that to me as well.
Nato says
a 3 letter dictionary word .com is likely to be 7-8 figures. I’m leaning on 8 figures. So you’d have to do exceptionally well to afford that.
The domain is the business, they should not have built their business on shaky grounds without owning the domain.
Ethan Taylor says
On on hand, it’s a pity that they didn’t get to keep what they have been using. On the other hand, their new .co domain can at least raise those influencers’ awareness that there is such a shorter, lovely domain extension (in my opinion).
snoopy1267 says
From what I have read just before about this there wasn’t much value in the website anyway. (which would explain whey they can’t afford to lease and/or buy the domain.)
“Patreon acquired Kit in June 2018 in what Patreon’s SVP Product Wyatt Jenkins described to me during my in-depth series on the company as “close to an acqui-hire,” adding that “although Kit is a good revenue source for a lot of creators — so it’s not a shut-down of Kit — we’re maintaining it but not iterating on it.”
https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/12/patreon-sells-product-curation-site-kit-to-geniuslink/
Vijay says
This news once again proves that leasing a domain is a bad idea to go..
NG says
Sometimes it hard to lose a domain especially old domain but sometimes you just have to consider the seo before doing that.
stevo1957 says
Lease to own is the best way. Agree on final price – and once paid, the domain (and all of your hard work) is yours.