Domain Name Wire | Domain Name News

Domain Name Industry News

Featured Domains

Pablo Escobar’s family is selling his intellectual property for $1.9 million

by — Uncategorized 16 Comments

Want to own a dead drug lord’s IP?

Screenshot of EscobarInc.com website promoting a flamethrower for sale

Escobar Inc. holds a number of trademearks for “Pablo Escobar”, the infamous druglord. The company sells a flamethrower (pictured).

Last year, Pablo Escobar’s heirs won control of the domain name PabloEscobar.com. Now they are putting the domain and the late Colombian drug lord’s intellectual property rights up for sale.

Media Options, a domain name brokerage firm, is handling the sale.

Pablo Escobar’s brother and the former accountant for the Medellin Cartel, Roberto Escobar, re-formed Escobar Inc in 2014. It proceeded to capture as much intellectual property rights as possible.

Now Escobar, Inc. is trying to sell the rights for $1.9 million. The package includes:

  • PabloEscobar.com Domain Name
  • other related domain names including: Escobar.Life, Escobar.World, PabloEscobar.Club, PabloEscobar.us & others…
  • Over 30+ Trademarks
  • Copyrights
  • Successor-in-interest rights in all 50 United States
  • A painting (fresco) given to Pablo Escobar by his mother on his last birthday before he was killed
  • A video of Roberto Escobar holding the painting mentioned above and telling the story of how his mother gave the painting to Pablo
  • All documentation available providing the details regarding the rights, provenance, chain of custody & authority related to such rights

I’m sure any serious buyer will perform due diligence on the intellectual property. Escobar, Inc. has tried to extract payments from Nexflix for its Narcos series, and has threatened Elon Musk for selling flamethrowers.

NamesCon sets dates for summer show in Budapest

by — Services 1 Comment

Domain investing conference will hold its 2020 summer show in Budapest.

Picture of budapest with the words "NamesCon Budapest" in front

Just a week before its big show in Austin, NamesCon has finalized the dates for its summer show in Europe.

The conference will take place August 6-8, 2020 at the Budapest Marriott Hotel on the bank of the Danube.

Budapest appears to have beautiful weather in August, with an average high of 82° Fahrenheit and an average low of 63°.

The European version of the show is smaller than the United States show, but that means more intimate conversations and connections.

Pre-sale passes are available for €249.

A startup changed its domain from .com to .top

by — Domain Sales 16 Comments

Some companies trade in longer .coms for shorter second level domains in other extensions.

Yellow background with the words "Domain Name Change"

I love watching the Chinese domain market because it is full of surprises. Recently, I read a news story that a Chinese startup changed its domain from .com to .top. That challenges the conventional wisdom of .com being the ultimate upgrade.

Cryptocurrency exchange DCPPlus was founded in 2017 (apparently in Hong Kong) and it operated from the brand-matching domain DCPPlus.com. The exchange handles multiple digital currencies including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin. Recently, its name was shortened to simply DCP. To accompany the name change, the founders acquired DCP.top for reportedly 100,000 yuan (about $15,000) on December 6, 2019.

DCP.top has gone live and DCPPlus.com forwards visitors to the new site. Why not upgrade to DCP.com? Well, this is not possible because DCP.com is already being used by the American M&A firm District Capital Partners.

This reminds me of the company Supply whose founders pitched successfully in Shark Tank and received a $300,000 investment last year. The company then changed its domain from GetSupply.com to Supply.co. Why the change? Founder Patrick Coddou later tweeted “it will forever be worth it to not be called Get Supply anymore”. In other words, GetSupply.com misled consumers to believe the company’s name was actually “Get Supply”.

In these two cases, we can see that the founders consider the name part of a domain more important than its extension. In choosing a domain, its name is considered first, followed by its extension – and the name must match the brand.

Of course, the ultimate upgrade remains the exact match .com. Carrot founder Trevor Mauch told Domain Name Wire that people referred to his company as “On Carrot” when his company used the domain OnCarrot.com. He upgraded to Carrot.com.

How much are domain names selling for in China?

by — Domain Sales 6 Comments

Here’s a handy way to find out what domains are selling for in China.

Screenshot of eName's domain price search

From time to time, I get asked to look at a list of domains for advice on how much to sell them for in China. My reply is always the same: do your own research. One thing you can do is to look at similar domains being sold in China. So, today I’ll write about a website you can use to do your research.

eName is one of the Top 10 domain registrars in China and it also offers some content in English. Just visit eName.com and click the English button. From the Find Domains menu, select BIN. This gives you all domains listed with a price. From here, you can set up filters to find selling prices of specific types of domains you are interested in. Here are some examples of use.

Suppose you want to know the selling prices of 4 letter .com domains. Click the Category drop-down list and select “4-letter”, then click the Suffix drop-down list and select “.com”. Finally, click the Search button. When the search result appears, click the Cur Price heading to sort the prices from the lowest to the highest, and change “Each page shows” to 100 so that you can examine a significant size of the domains. If you want to know details of a domain, just click its name. Since some information is still available in Chinese, you can use Google Translate to get a rough idea of the content.

This is the result of the 4 letter  .com search that I see as of this writing: there are 41,714 domains listed with a price. The cheapest domain is UQTG.com at 550 yuan (about $80) and the cheapest 100 domains are priced at less than $150. Now you can compare your domain with the displayed domains and try to arrive at a price for your domain.

How about 7 number .com domains? From the Category list, select “Pure Number”, then enter 7 to 7 for the Length. The result shows that there are 6,574 domains listed with a price. The cheapest domain is 4177778.com at 75 yuan (about $11) and the cheapest 100 domains are priced at less than $45. Again, compare your domain with the displayed domains and try to arrive at a price for your domain.

You can look at many types of domains such as Pinyin, mixed characters, and Chinese IDN, as well as a variety of extensions such as .net, .org, and .club. So, be sure to spend some time and learn how to use the filters for your purpose.

What you really need to know about the sale of .Org to private equity

by — Policy & Law 5 Comments

Let’s cut through the clutter and falsehoods.

Logo for .org domain, featuring a blue circle with white letters spelling ORGA lot has been said and written about Internet Society’s (ISOC) sale of Public Interest Registry, the group that runs .org, to Ethos Capital. Some of it is true, some of it is false, and some of it is up to interpretation. This goes both ways; ISOC and Ethos have some bad (or at least misleading) talking points, but much of the fuss on the internet is wrong or based on questionable data.

Here’s what you need to know.

The deal solidifies ISOC’s financial future

It’s hard to debate that this deal doesn’t make sense for ISOC, at least financially. It’s trading in an annual revenue stream for an endowment. As long as it has a reasonable way to invest that endowment, it should be able to generate steady cash flow going forward.

While the domain name business has been on a steady, mostly upward trajectory for .org, there is certainly risk that this could change in the future. I understand why ISOC views this as a good financial move for its organization. I’m sure it knew it would get some pushback, but it decided that the opportunity was too good to pass up.

PIR is not cash-strapped and and can easily reinvest in .org

One of ISOC’s and Ethos’ talking points is that, because PIR has to give its profits to ISOC, it is cash-strapped and can’t reinvest in the registry or new products and services.

There are two questions at play here: (1) is .org declining? and (2) is PIR cash-strapped? Click here to continue reading…