In this week’s Sales Roundup, I’m going behind the numbers to see why the top 5 names from this week’s DNJournal sales chart sold for the prices they did. The names this week include MIM.com for $133,100, CashGo.com for $75,000, and Chatroom.com for $65,167.
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MIM.com – $133,100
The top sale on the DNJournal list from this week is MIM.com, sold by Sedo for €110,000, which DNJournal has converted to $133,100 at the time of publishing.
Three-letter .COM domains selling for six-figures or more is a common occurrence. In 2020 alone, we have seen 8 names sell for $100,000 or more, according to NameBio. There have very likely been tens more sales that have happened behind the scenes.
MIM.com was sold by Sedo on behalf of S2MI SAS, a French IT company. MIM.com used to host a women’s clothing company, but recently the name has held a for sale notice.
The domain transferred to a privacy protected NameCheap account so there are few clues to be found there as to the owner’s identity.
However, at the time of writing, Mim.com shows a landing page with a Tumes Media email address listed. Tumes Media, according to its website, is an online performance marketing company that owns more than 100 informational websites in 8 languages.
If MIM.com is to be used for a multilingual site, “MIM” is Portuguese for “me,” so that could be one potential usage.
The company was founded by Internet entrepreneur Tuomas Eskelinen, and they specialize in the iGaming and finance industries.
As of writing, there are few clues to the final project that MIM.com will be used for, but at this time, it looks like the name will be developed rather than resold.
CashGo.com – $75,000
Second on the list is CashGo.com, a name sold by XYNames.com, which has previously reported sales such as StoryKids.com for $37,500, and TalkOut.com for $21,250. In short, that’s a reputation of getting an excellent return on names that others may have sold cheaper.
The sale of CashGo.com was facilitated thanks to a payment plan, allowing the buyer to pay the $75,000 fee in installments.
Despite the buyer paying what’s likely to have been a sizable monthly fee, there has been no activity on the domain that I can see.
The domain remains parked, but there are links to several loan websites all likely owned by the same Canadian individual that, according to DomainIQ, owns a small portfolio of basic “loan” and “credit” domains. Could CashGo.com have been acquired to generate leads to this small network of sites?
Chatroom.com – $65,167
If this name had been sold 10 or 15 years ago, I think that Chatroom.com would have been a mid-six-figure sale thanks to the popularity of chatrooms at the time. This Google Trends report shows how much of a decline in interest there has been in the “chatroom” keyword since 2004:
Despite this, the name still sold for $65,167. At DNJournal, the sale is attributed to “SellYourDomain,” but NameBio shows the name sold at NameJet. SellYourDomain is under the same Web.com company umbrella as NameJet, with SellYourDomain accounting for third party sales on NameJet and SnapNames, rather than expiry auctions.
We can establish, then, that this was a name sold at auction via a Web.com platform. Chatroom.com was acquired by Xedoc Holdings SA, a domain investment company that has owned many high-value domains.
The company also holds a number of adult names, and it looks as though Chatroom.com has been put to work as an NSFW site.
SportsBet.ca – $35,000
This sale ranks as the second-largest publicly disclosed .CA sale of the behind Tickets.ca at $77,000. Interestingly, the three largest .CA sales of the year have now been sold by the same venue, Emall.ca.
Emall.ca reportedly owns several thousand .CA domains and has previously sold names such as Loans.ca for $88,000.
As you may know, the .CA extension is the ccTLD for Canada. According to various sources, there is some ambiguity over whether sports betting is strictly allowed in Canada, but a BetHQ article estimates that Canadians spend over $2 billion with offshore bookmakers each year.
With the amount of spending occurring in sports gambling, it should come as no surprise that a generic betting name such as SportsBet.ca could sell for a five-figure fee.
As of writing, the domain and its associated data show no signs of who the potential buyer is. It’s very likely, though, that the domain has been acquired to be developed for the Canadian gambling market.
Novoo.com – $30,000
Fifth on this week’s DNJournal list is Novoo.com, a brandable five-letter .COM that sold at Sedo for $30,000. The name was sold by Sedo on behalf of what looks to be a South Korean investor with tens of thousands of names associated with them.
Novoo.com was acquired by Financière Rendy, a sizable French company that looks to be a major player in the wholesale business within France. There’s very little data available, so this connection between Financière Rendy and Novoo.com is based on the minimal WHOIS data alone.
Assuming the buyer is Financière Rendy, with a corporate website at groupe-rondy.com, the domain must have been acquired for a new project that hasn’t been announced yet. I can find no mention of Novoo in relation to Financière Rendy, and no French trademarks to match, either. As of writing, Novoo.com hosts a default registrar page.
IMO, MIM.com was undersold. Buyer got a great deal here.
Thanks for sharing.