The Infinite Value of Domains

In this session, we’re doing some math and adding up the value of some of the top domain names in the world, the top 60,000 to be exact. The approximated number was in the billions of course, and it made us consider things like accessibility, length, and other subcategories in relation to the ever-growing domain world.

The most important thing in evaluating the price of a domain name is the motivation of the seller

PAGE HOWE
  • Read the Transcript

    Million Dollar Domains: EP08

    Hey everybody. Welcome in million domains, we’ll start here a little bit after the top of the hour. Great to see everybody. I hope you’re having a good week and a good Wednesday.

    We do record this show, so you will be recorded if you come up to be a speaker, for those of you, the first time coming in a million dollar domains, we talk about a part of the domain market of what we call me. I called million dollar domains. Now you may want to buy a million dollar domain for a hundred thousand dollars. But it’s the idea that we’re talking about the title.

    And I’m going to say the word premium, but I know we’re trying to get away from the word premium but really the top names. So I’m going to call a million dollar domains, MDD, and  that’s what we’ll talk about today. Got a good show today.

    I’m going to talk about just what might the total value of all million dollar domains be and do it in a way that it can be repeated and kind of enter in to the digital property space, a number and and I think that. It’s a, it’s a number that I’m not sure what it’s going to end up being. And it certainly helps to get additional perspective on how I’m calculating the number in case people have any ideas of, oh, you might want to go this direction.

    You might want to go this direction. So anyway, I’m going to talk about that. Going to talk about million dollar domains have sold over the past couple of weeks. I had a chance to listen to an interview with Michael Saylor about Bitcoin today on CNBC. His company micro strategy has probably, he’s probably one of the biggest advocates for Bitcoin made some really interesting comments about digital property that I think affects domains.

    And then read an article this week about the Telegraph. So I’m going to take you back for a little domain name, history lesson with the Telegraph, but let’s see if we can’t invite a couple more folks in.

    anybody have a comment or question just to get everybody warmed up today, as we’re all taking our seats, I feel like if this was a conference, we’d all be kind of coming in and yeah, you go to sit down, but then you see somebody two seats ahead of you. And you’re like, oh, I haven’t seen you since the last show.

    And I can’t wait till we get back to doing in person conferences. And I’ll have some more information about that later this month, but I’m sorry to be distracted here. I’m inviting some folks in, if you’re already here and you get an invite. Sorry about that.

    Once I start clicking, I just can’t stop. You don’t stop.

    Let me see who else? Oh yeah. Oh, absolutely. Well, anyway, I know it’s a work day for many of you. I’m not sure what time zone you’re on. You might be doing some work at home or in your office or at your job. And so I appreciate you coming in. If you’re listening to our replay thank you. Our replays for domain club are available@domain.club and at startup club and domain club is affiliated with startup club, which is the largest club.

    800,000 members. And I do a show each week on startup club. And so we do link our replays there. And then clubhouse has a neat feature now where I can share a link to today’s room as a podcast. And someone doesn’t necessarily have to be download the clubhouse app, become a user. They can just listen to the room as a podcast.

    And so we do transcribe the rooms and we try to make we use an auto transcription. So it’s not always perfect, but it does give us an ability to make a blog post for each show. So welcome to million dollar domains. I do want to address. My project to determine what the top and I put down 60,000 domains, because I started with categories of domains that we’ve talked about a lot here this last year.

    And this year about names that, you know, we think are clearly in the million dollar name category, like one word domain names, like short domain names, like anything, in my opinion, that can, you can make a list of so that you can create scarcity. You can create scarcity by. Named being countries or cities or colors or animals or sports.

    And I think those are ways where you can create the idea that your domain, if you own pineapple.com or if you own baseball.com if you own a portugal.com, which sold for 350,000 last year, if you own new york.com or atlanta.com, which is part of a package for sale for 30 million right now that, that, because you can talk about that name being one of a few, to be able to accomplish a certain purpose for local marketing, that those names have value.

    And then I made some assumptions about what I thought the average value of a name in some of those categories might. And that’s what I use to come up with the list. So let me go ahead and do our articles first. Let’s see, let me pin a link and I never know if you have to do the HTTPS, isn’t it funny that as much as the internet has been around for such a long time, I feel like if you ask the question, do you have to put HTTP or HTTPS or www at the beginning of a link?

    We still don’t really know the answer to that. Or maybe it’s just me. Alright. Let’s see if that works. Million-dollar domains. It looks good. Okay.

    All right. So what I do each week is I put a blog post for each show, a million dollar domain. So you can see some of these. Blog posts. And some of the notes that I made on shows dating back to all last year and what we try to do here at billion dollar domains. And we try to talk about million dollar domains, single word, rare scarce, two word combination names that are going to help your business, your startup.

    They’re going to give you a prestige value of multiple millions of dollars. And the reason behind million dollar domains is that if you’re listening to this, because you. I’ve been approached about a million dollar domain name or you’re thinking maybe it’s something your company should do. I wanted to create a place where we can talk and discuss and ask questions.

    And I could maybe provide some education for people before they’re being approached with a specific name, because obviously the seller of a name wants to get the most money they can. So they’re going to define their name to be a million or multi-million dollar domain name. But if you don’t really have some perspective on what makes a good domain name, why your domain name is worth this much?

    And if you’re the CEO of a company, I believe that the decision to buy a million dollar domain name is really only able to be made by. Board or by a CEO because everybody else in a company might be competing for resources. And they would like to see that money, go to hiring more people, to hiring more systems, to, to doing more studies to doing things that would benefit their silo inside the company.

    But a domain name is an asset that I think gives value to the whole enterprise of the company. It makes sure prestige value higher and who can make that decision. Usually it’s the owner of the business. Who’s acting as a principal and the CEO or the board because they know what it means to increase the value of the business.

    One to three to five to 10%, they know what it means to have an asset inside the company that can make every dollar they spend on marketing 10 to 20 to 30% more. So by owning an asset for a fixed price, when you buy it and only having to pay this small renewal fee for a dot-com domain name of $9. If you bought an asset that makes the 10 to 20 to $30 million a year, you’re spending on marketing more effective, then you can quantify the value of that domain name.

    So there’s a lot of financial companies that have gone to one word domain names. One of them would be upgrade.com and upgrade.com. Will they sell you loans? They say your other financial products. And what they decided was if we have one word short, prestigious, positive, that’s going to make our company more valuable every day.

    So every day that we spend a million dollars on advertising, If you say you’re going to be 10% more effective and you spend a million dollars a month on advertising, then that’s 10%. You’ve got, you’re going to make an essence a hundred thousand a month. You’re going to be able to get the same bang for your buck for a million dollars of advertising by only spending 900,000, because your name was short, easy to remember prestigious.

    And they talked about the idea that you have to get your name in front of a customer 10 times. Well, what if, because you have a short value creating one word domain name, you’ll only have to get your name in front of the customer five times. How much have you lowered your cost of acquisition for that customer now, and then multiply that times 12 months in a year and multiply that by owning the name for 10 years.

    So I think there are ways to quantify domain names as to how much they can be worth to a company or an enterprise. Yet when you go by the name, what I can share with you from someone who’s sold million dollar names, I own two of the biggest domain name sales of the first 20 years of domaining seniors.com and guide.com with both both sold for more than a million dollars.

    How did I come up with my price? Most of the time, it’s just my imagination. What, what do I think I can get for this name? What do I think I can sell it for? But we have not approached the level where people, the seller is doing anything more than imagining a price. And if the buyer knows. How valuable the name is, yes.

    They’re going to try to negotiate and get the best deal. And they’re going to ask the seller, you know, what’s the lowest amount that you’ll take for the name, but really, I think the reason that buyers have an edge in today’s market, when it comes to certain specific names that they know we’re going to help them either be more effective in their marketing.

    What if by having the one word domain name for your company, when you raised say $20 million in your class, in your B round or your C round, you could say, well, you know what? I think we’re going to value the company at 50 million because our company’s name is a, is a two word name. And then all of a sudden, you say, you know what, we could get the option to buy a one-word domain name.

    So say Mike company, Joe domains, Sam is going to raise money for Joe domains. I had a really good operating plan. I was going to value my company at $5 million and all of a sudden I have an opportunity to buy domains. Where I have an opportunity to buy joe.com. And even if I had to spend a million dollars on joe.com, what if all of a sudden, when I went to raise my money, I could say, you know what, I’m valuing the company at $8 million now.

    Cause I’m joe.com or I’m valuing the company at $10 million because I’m domains.com. And not only have I increased the valuation of my company, that means I as the founder, I’m going to own more of a. So there’s a lot of ways that I want to share with you, why million dollar and high quality domain names are valuable.

    And hopefully as people are listening to this months in the future, or even years in the future, they’re doing some research because they’re thinking about buying their best name and their ultimate name. And hopefully because I’m not necessarily pitching you a name right now, I’m just talking about the whole category of million dollar names.

    I think that I can go over some points that are going to come in to every discussion. Like I just mentioned, when you buy a domain name, how long do you own it for what you own when you buy a domain name is you own the guaranteed right? To renew that domain name each year by paying $9. And so. Some people, we still have an unclear definition of whether a domain name is property, but what you absolutely have is you have the sole and exclusive right to continue to renew that domain name every year for paying the registration fee, which right now is between nine and $35.

    And even though it’s set to go up 7% a year, you’re talking about your costs, your renewal costs going from maybe $9 to $13 over the next five years, when you may have paid a million dollars for the double. The way you own a domain name is you have it in your account at a registrar. A registrar is very similar to the way you own stocks.

    You don’t really have stock certificates much anymore. If you own shares of apple, you have an account at Merrill Lynch and they have your stock in your account at Merrill Lynch. And you both have an account at Merrill Lynch, and that has a name and address associated with it. And then each stock that you have has a name and address associated with it and a domain name.

    There’s actually four contacts, pieces of contact information for a domain name. You have the owner of the account. The domain name is health. Then you have the administrative contact for that domain name. You have the technical contact, you have the billing contact. And we don’t. When, when domains first started, the thought was your technical con contact might be someone in the company that would deal with technical matters.

    Your billing contact might be someone in the company that would pay the renewal. The owner would be the legal name of the company that own the domain name. And then the administrative contact would be the person who knew about domain names in the company that when they got an email that said, this domain name is coming up for renewal, or there’s a problem with your domain name, and this person wants to contact you, that they would understand what that message meant.

    And that if the technical contact was only focused on technical issues, they may not be the best person to be in charge of all the issues related to a domain name. So you have an owner and administrative contact, a technical contact and a billing contact. That’s the same, whether the domain cost $8 or 80,000 or 800,000 or 8 million.

    So, what we do on billion dollar domains is we talk about these domain names. And, and even though you can make a lot of money, you know, trading in domain names below $10,000, you can make a lot of money building websites on domain names. You can make a lot of money buying domain names that have previous traffic, and you can capture some of the old traffic and the old credibility in those domain names.

    What we’re gonna talk about today are high value domain names, and specifically a million dollar domain names. So we’ve had a lot of, let’s see I’m hold on a second. I’m just writing down something real quick, that a lot of articles and news in the past couple of weeks. So I’m going to go over some stories, one at a time.

    Some of these, I thought I was going to do last week, but I didn’t, and you’ll see the links to these stories on million dollar domains.com which is the same as billion dollar names.com. So what we have in our industry is we have a really good network of bloggers who continually try to find different names that, that have been registered or changed hands and, and research what they may have changed hands for.

    And it gives us a real good peak of what’s happening out there because we don’t have a Dow Jones industrial average, where you could go on TV tonight and see what happened to domain name. And we don’t have an MLS system where you can go on there and click your zip code and click sold and look at what houses sold in your area.

    And, and so what we do have is a really active blogger community. And I want to give credit to Elliot silver at domain investing to Andrew Allaman at domain name wire to James Isles, that James names for doing such a good job of finding these sales to George  and the way he comes out with them.

    So the first one I put a link to was the name guru.com, which had been in the possession of Nat Cohen’s company since 2001 has apparently changed hands in a sales transaction. So we don’t quite know what the price is, but NATS company telepathy It is very wise and the domain name business, I would call them a dear seller.

    And what I mean by that is when you look at the price of a domain name and a domain name transaction, I think the most important thing in evaluating the price of a domain name is the motivation of the seller. Does the seller have to sell, is the seller informed about what they’re selling? Is the seller in the business of, of selling domain names because they own millions of them potentially.

    There’s a couple of owners that own millions of domain names. And so they need high volume. Does the seller have a low cost basis in the name? So anytime they sell a name, they can produce a positive earnings for their company or in this case, is the seller. Been in the domain business for 20 years.

    And since they started Navis had a pretty good idea about the rarity and scarcity of domain names. And I would say he wants to get his ultimate value. So if you look@anamelikegoo.com goo not only do you have a three letter domain name, which has rarity, and so one syllable pronounceable, but it’s an easily brandable name and it looks like the domain was acquired by a cryptocurrency startup.

    So you now you’ve got a company where their ability to use the internet to gain a customer, allows the customer to trade and make money all online and cryptocurrency in some ways is the ultimate direct to consumer business. And what I mean by that is. In the past and the past 50 years, the way you did business, mostly.

    And I’m going to generalize is that you would have things like distribution, which you did through intermediaries, like wholesalers or retail stores. You had marketing, which you might do through outside agencies. You had management, which you may have to hire a huge amount of staff to do, but in today’s companies, many direct to consumer companies, they don’t have to use distributors.

    They can deal with companies directly. They can fulfill their product online, they’re selling any product or product that can be bought online. They want to advertise directly into the customer. They don’t necessarily need to pay someone else to reach the customer. They’re going to reach the customer directly and then advertise to them over and over again.

    They may not be hiring a huge staff of employees. They may be outsourcing each step of their company and be a virtual company. So if you think about those three things together, I don’t know what guru.com sold for, but I’m probably betting it was above $2 million. And I don’t know that. And I don’t mean to say that I’d say it was less than that, that the seller left money on the table, or if it was more than that, that the buyer overpaid.

    I just think that one syllable, you know, there there’s about 17,003 letter domain names and there might be 3000 that are pronounceable words, and there might be, I don’t know, 300 that are, that are pronounced. One syllable words. And so I just think that that maybe this was probably in the one to $2 million range.

    So that’s a perfect example of a premium name. And once this name is sold, if you look at that category of domain names, three letter, one word. Pronounceable phonetically appealing. You know, I think about words that could go, I’m going to date myself with growing up, I watched the Batman cartoon series and when Batman would have a fight with the bad guys, he would punch them and they would have a a little little button.

    I forgot what they call those a little button would pop up, but it wouldn’t say pal wham, zap, you know, and that would be the, for lack of a better word, the sound effect of him being in a fight. And so I always think about words like GU in this case that would be like that, you know, one syllable marketing words, powerful marketing words.

    So say there’s only a certain amount of those once this one’s gone and you have a company operating off that if you come in now and you want to buy pal or wow, or zap. You’re probably going to have to pay more because there’s now one less of those names out there. So substitution is important. If someone is looking for the features of a name, how many other names are available and at what price is a big determinant for the value of the.

    If you look at a name that gets a lot of advertising right now, online crypto.com, that name has very little substitution. You might say that digital.com could be as good or coin.com or token.com. But each one of those you can say, well, that doesn’t have the power of crypto. And so you could say the crypto doesn’t have a lot of substitution, so it’s going to set its own price without any competition.

    Now, if you look at a name like maybe the most famous example, I think people use is like attorney.com. So say you were going to buy attorney.com. Well, someone else may say, well, you know what? You want $2 million for attorney.com, but there’s someone selling attorneys.com for 750,000. We may just go with that and you can argue the relative merits of each name, but there is some substitution there for attorney attorney.

    Lawyer lawyers, law legal. And you might say that yes, one of those might be better than another one, but at the same point there is an option for a buyer. So one of the things you want to look at, if you’re valuing a domain name, is, is there a lot of substitution for the domain name and for what the buyers using it for?

    Do they have other options? And that’s really the main component in a negotiation that I try to pay attention to. If a buyer just says to me, and I own a million dollar domain name that they’d like to pay a lower price, I totally understand if I was friends with the person and we were having lunch together.

    And he was telling me that he’s thinking about buying something. And he said, I’d like to get the lower price. I would agree with them. I totally hear you. I would too. But when it comes to negotiating, just the fact that he’d like to get a lower price, really isn’t going to sway me. If I think my asset is worth a certain amount, but one thing that can be powerful is when someone says we have the absolute opportunity to buy a name.

    And once we buy that, we don’t need your name anymore. And, and we may go do that. So if you’re asking two to $5 million, cause you think your name is irreplaceable, I think it makes sense to know whether your name is really irreplaceable because. They do have the ability. If you quote them a price that’s so high.

    And even if you’re a really good negotiator and you never come off your price, if they truly have another option, you have to respect the fact that they can go with the other option. And the best way to tell if someone has another option is do they keep coming back? Do they offer if you’re the owner of a million dollar domain name and, and they asked you what the price was and you say a million and a half dollars.

    And they say, we were thinking around 300,000 and then. Offer them something in the middle, or you might say it doesn’t seem like we’re in the right ballpark, but, you know, I wish you luck and good luck and nice to meet you. And if they come back again and say, we were just wondering whether you’ve thought about, you know, you’ll, you’ll tell whether the buyer you know, really, you know, once your name, but so when I think of a name like guru.com, I think that maybe it was one to $2 million and we used to have a name like goo.com sell maybe once every six months.

    But if you look at just the stories of the last two weeks we’re going to go over probably 10 names of that caliber that have sold. The other thing I wanted to mention is that right in the.is having an auction. That’s now open for submissions right at the dot. I believe two successful auctions.

    Last year, they did one during the names con I think they did one of the summer. This one’s going to be upcoming here February 24th, beginning at 1:00 PM. And he’s open for submissions. Now the deadline for submissions is February 17th and I’ve bought a lot of attractive names at Monte’s auctions and I’ve sold my biggest name ever at Monte’s auction.

    Monte in many ways was one of the original domain investors and he was one of the original people who had the creativity behind developing the domain name, business both what a registrar might look like that serve. People that owned more than a hundred or more than a thousand domain names. When a marketplace look like what traffic income might look like would brokering might look like what customer service might look like.

    And so Monte Khan has been a pillar really of the domain community and, and a good friend of mine. So he’s coming up with an auction. Please read the rules on submissions. Normally an auction house will have a percentage of the money that you’re paying. They will have an exclusivity period that they’ll be asking if you’re listing a name of that auction, where many times from the moment you submit the name, even if you don’t know if it’s going to be accepted in the live auction, you’re under.

    Hey agreement with Monte’s company, they may use your name and they may put it on a list of names that might be in the upcoming auction. And so you may have someone contact you the next week and say, Hey, I noticed you have this name for sale. I’d like to get a good deal on it. And I think you need to be aware that you’re probably.

    An exclusivity agreement, where if you sell it away from Monte that you, you may be on the hook for the commission, that would be due him as the auction house. And, and I think you want to make sure you’re aware of that. What the commission is, what the time period is that, that you would owe him a commission.

    If the name sells it usually can continue anywhere from one to three to six months. Even sometimes they can have a longer than six month period, especially if you’re selling it. If you end up selling it to someone who was a bidder on the auction, especially if they were the high better, and maybe they were below your reserve.

    So that’s the first thing I’d say is if you’re listing names there. You know, be aware of the rules now for a buyer. I think in many cases, the auction can be a good place to buy a domain name because instead of opening up a uncertain negotiation process where. You may say you may use your husband’s cousin’s best friend email to inquire about the name, even though you’re the CEO of a microchip company or something like that.

    And, and you’re trying to hide who you are because you’re trying to be a good businesswoman or a good businessman. And, and let the same point, the buyer is trying to figure out who the buyer is. Because there’s there’s a sense both of greed. I want to see if this could be someone that’s going to pay me a lot of money and fear.

    What if I negotiate? At a price. And I find out later that the buyer would have paid more. There’s a lot of emotion tied in for, I believe for the seller of a domain name in many cases. Now, if you’re working with a company or an experienced broker, I think it’s more likely that it’s about name and price.

    But I think if someone has owned the domain name for 10 or 20 years, sometimes they can have a lot of their identity in that domain name and in what that domain name they may have bought for literally 30 or $70 back in the 1990s. And they have spent 20 years wondering what it’s worth turning down offers regretting that they took some offers.

    Wishing they would’ve taken other offers. And I think if you’re dealing with an individual seller, you need to be ready for those type of, of, of of facets that you might not see in, in negotiations for other pieces of property. But I think what happens in so-so, you may have an uncertain process. You may not know if you’re negotiating with an individual seller, whether you really agreed on a price you may say to them, well, what do you think the lowest you’d sell it for?

    And they may say, well, I need at least 500,000. And then as the buyer, you say, okay, I’ll do it. But you have to remember that the seller didn’t say that they’d sell it for 500,000. They said they would need at least that much. And they may in their mind have felt like there was an open-ended price. Quote that they were like, well, what I really meant was I need a million and, and then you may say, okay, we’ll do the million.

    But until you have an agreement in writing and an and, and many times until you have the Dame transferred to you, you may still be up against him saying I’ve had second thoughts. You may have against someone where she says, you know, I’ve had to talk to my business partner and we’ve decided to go another direction.

    They may came up and say, oh, I’ve done some research and I’ve decided to build this. And you don’t know for sure that you have it. And in many times that can be frustrating to the buyer of a million dollar domain name because You’ve had to go through and build consensus in your company to make sure that the finance team is on board, the strategy team, the board investors the technical team.

    And, and you’ve had to get a lot of people buying in and they want to know the price that you’re going to get the name for. And you may have to say, well, we’re thinking around this, but I haven’t got it nailed down yet. So one of the things that’s attractive to me about acquiring a name and an auction is that Monte has already got a seller to agree in writing, to sell a name above a certain reserve.

    And you may want there to be no other bidders. You may want to be able to bid your highest amount. And if that doesn’t meet reserve, maybe offer the person less later. If you’re, if, if the difference between having the name and not having the name could be worth 2, 3, 5, 10 times what you’re paying, knowing that once you’ve met reserve, if you’re the winning bidder, you’re going to get that name.

    I think that certainty is really attractive. And in many cases, Monte has helped you put a fair reserve amount on the name, you know, Monte and his company. Aren’t going to be that successful. If every name in the auction is valued and has a reserve price of two to three to five or 10 times what it’s worth, then they’re going to spend all this time and all this effort and nothing is going to close.

    So I think he does some of the work for you of putting the name and a reasonable rent. And many times he may have tried to establish a lower reserve so that when he’s auctioneer the name, it will meet reserve early in the process. Think about a live auction and think about you as a bidder when you’re bidding on a name and you don’t know yet.

    If, if, if you’re the winning bidder, you’ll win it versus winning a name that’s already met its reserved price. And now it’s just a matter of who will get that. Will you get it or will someone else get it? And the thing that’s important about that is you don’t know if the person who’s also bidding as a competitor is another domain investor that could have expectations quite a bit higher.

    Maybe you’re bidding 150,000 for a name and there’s another domain and you’re going to use it in your company. And another investor bids, 170. And once they own it, the price is going to go to a million. So, you know, you’ve got this opportunity as an end-user to sometimes buy in a domain name, auction against other investors.

    And the reason that can be attractive, if you really know the value of a domain name is that a domain investor is comparing the opportunity to own the name. But they don’t know when they’re going to sell it once they buy it. If I’m bidding $80,000 on a domain name as an investor, I’m comparing that against every other domain, I can invest $80,000 in, and I’m also having to want to pay a discount to the market value of that domain name, because I don’t know when I might sell it.

    I may have that money at risk for six months or two years or three years, or there may never come up, you know, a buyer along to get it. So I think that the advantages that you have as a reap, as a buyer, an end-user buyer and an auction, or are that you’re, you might be bidding against other domain investors.

    And because they’re looking at it with an uncertain future and you’re looking at it because you know how. You know what it’s worth to you? I think you have advanced sorting that’s these auction. Let’s see what else we have in our article list today. George at Ghouta a J UTA and I always put a P in there.

    I don’t know why I do that. He did a premium domain sales report for the year 2021, and I’ve put a link to this report and he has been one of the primary brokers in the, the A’s center of the Chinese market for the last 10 years. And he also has a real appreciation for what names and what characters and what numbers translate and carry a high value internationally in ways that.

    What I might call Western domain investors may not appreciate, you may not know that when you pronounce your name that in Chinese, it sounds like this very attractive word. And even if it’s letters that we don’t really think makes sense, they could be letters that a huge percentage of Chinese word start with.

    And so between that and his knowledge of a lot of buyers, he’s done a domain sales report and he focused on last year on a lot of the two word names that sold it.com for 3.8 million I s.com for 1,000,950 e.com for 1,000,350. And izea.com acquired for 625,000. And I didn’t know that, that he says it was acquired by Namecheap.

    We’ll see if that resolved something. That’s one that I hadn’t seen on the other reporting sites. It looks like they, it says acquired by name fee. Bob, do some more work on that one, but anyway it’s a very interesting report on the values of short two letter names, then he covers three letter names.

    He talks about the total domains sold in 2021 were 75 names. In end-user sales. He thought that there was 15 of the 75 sales. He kind of tagged us in user sales. And the reason I use that price is because I think that especially in the three letter category And I’ll talk about this. When I talked about the value of all the names for sale three letter domain names have become kind of a commodity that some people may say I’ll buy any three letter name for $20,000.

    I’ll buy any three letter name for 30,000 hours. There’s an upcoming tracking stock at rally road. That’s going to track the value and let you participate in the value of, I think, four or five, three letter names. And when I am not affiliated with rally road, I’m not affiliated with the offer of.

    I’m not selling a security, I’m not a broker. So I have to fully disclaim when I talked about things like that. But but I think that that is one place where you can see the value of three letter names. But the second is when it does match a company’s initials, when it does match a shortner for a company that might be you know shin wan metal products, CMP in, in Chinese.

    And I would know how to say that, but it gives them a short, recognizable, brandable way to say they would be the most, the, the best name, the best company in the world with that name CMP. So when we talk about end-user sales, we talk about things last year in 2021, like a $2 million sale of afs.com acquired by Accenture federal services.

    The $2 million sale of nfte.com 450,000 was paid for EGT Euro games, technology 400,000 for FTA. So there’s a real difference between what a three-letter domain name may trade for as a commodity. Just the fact that you’re buying its potential in the future and what George tries to show in his report, or what are some of the sales to end-users.

    And I think that’s in essence, how a domain name investor or a private equity fund makes money in domain names is you is you have to think about it. If you’re a buyer that your seller has purchased the domain name at the time, it happened to be for. They’ve competed against all the other investors for that domain name and they’ve paid the highest price.

    And that’s how you, let’s say you get a domain name, but you’re still paying at a discount to what you hopefully, hopefully hope to sell it for now in the stock market, that discount is usually very small. I can buy a share of apple stock for $280 a share because I know I can sell it right away for $280 and 50 cents.

    So I’ll pay a lot closer to its ultimate value because I know I can get out of it the same for a lot of cryptocurrencies, the same for even houses. If I know that a house is in a neighborhood where every house sells for at least $600,000, and someone says, you can buy this house for 550. I know that I’m prying buying it below market.

    And then for some reason I didn’t want to live in it. I can sell it, but domain names don’t have. Way to ascertain what their value is, and they don’t have a clear market of who would pay a certain amount for a domain name. So because of that many domain investors are looking to buy names for 10 to 20 to 30 or as low as 1% of their ultimate value.

    So I think that he does a good job. George says in his report from a gouda.com of segmenting out retail sales and hotel sales, wholesale sales of these key domain names. Let’s see, the other article we had was we had a domain increased.com and the reason I wanted to mention this is I think the biggest category of companies who bought one word domain names last year were financial companies.

    So we have a company called increase.com launches private beta after acquiring increase.com. James Isles reports on his blog, James names.com and I encourage you to read it and subscribe to it. They acquired the name named the beginning of 2021 based upon a change in the, who is, and

    Let’s see, they provide end to end banking technology. So if you think about it, how much profit is involved in providing banking services to individuals and companies over the lifetime of a customer? You have some ex Stripe employees that started the company, and even James mentions that there’s a lot of companies in the financial services space that are bought names like embed.com.

    Titan.com and mercury.com. So we don’t have a price on it, but we do have the idea that it’s probably in the multiple hundreds of thousands, if not over a million, but it’s this idea that rather than being increase financial or go increase, or I increase or increase app or increased.solutions or something like that, they felt that they would go with increased.com.

    And I think we’re seeing more and more. Let’s see, we also have an article talking about rank first.com. This is from Ron Jackson who publishes DN journal. And he talked about in his lowdown column rank first.com or I’m sorry, bank first.com. Sorry. I have my SEO hat on bank. first.com selling for $800,000.

    And Kevin Murphy who runs a terrific blog called domain insight, found it in an sec filing. And the reason that a lot of times we find out about domain name purchases in the sec, filings is many times the company has to identify what it spent. $800,000. And so the CFO at this bank told Kevin when, when Kevin inquired that they acquired it from another financial institution.

    And it was a very big upgrade because this bank in Wisconsin had been using bank first wui.bank. And, and George  was able to find the SCC filing when they incurred a one-time expense to buy an asset for $800,000 as part of a rebranding initiative. That’s how they described it. And the rest of you see, finally, so if you’re sitting there for a company and you’re looking to pay one to two to three to $5 million, and someone says you don’t have to pay that, you shouldn’t have to pay that.

    No one else is paying it. Well, we’ve got a regional bank in Wisconsin paying $800,000 to be bank first.com. And if you think about over the lifetime of that bank, which has multiple offices, they’re not having to constantly tell people that their bank first. How do you even say that? Do you say bank first, Wisconsin, they’re not having to say we’re dot bank.

    And then people say, what is.bank? Now that banks had some neat things going for it. You had to be a qualified financial institution to get one. But if you think about brands. It really doesn’t help you. And so for that company, they’re now bank first.com. If they want to acquire companies throughout the country, they’re not always going to have to say email me at page at bank first bank Corp com.

    They’re going to be able to say we’re bank first.com. And so if you’re looking for other companies in your size that have paid a million dollars for a domain name, I think, you know, there’s a lot of examples. Now, if you’re learning about the domain space, I do want to make you aware of DN journal. It’s probably a many cases.

    Some people might call it the Bible of the industry. It’s the Ron Jack’s has been reporting on domain name transactions since 2003. And he is really the independent source for information on domain sales. And he publishes a weekly domain sales report and he also publishes a. Periodically updated lowdown section, where he puts a news blips like this.

    So if you’re a subscriber to D a journal, you want to subscribe and be notified of his articles, but for the low down and less, his poster picked up on an aggregator. You might want to make a habit of checking in on the lowdown every couple of days or following him on Facebook or Twitter so that when he does post something in DN journal, you’ll be aware of it either if it’s a sale or something, but you can also look at his weekly sales report.

    And then he maintains a year to date sales chart. So because he updates it he’s he’s in the same lowdown post, he also talked about that. He was able to report the sale of unlocked.com for $1.28 million. And I think, again, this is the type of name where. Five years ago, someone may have said, well, lock.com is a million dollar domain name, but unlock.

    I mean, that’s, you know, that’s a Subutex, a prefix, but I think unlocked itself is a powerful word. And if you think of what it conjures up in terms of unlocking your potential, maybe it is going to be used by a company where you simply unlocked, you know, it’s a locksmith or something like that. You’d have to be a pretty big locksmith.

    But I think if you look at the brandable power of these words, now that you’ve got a name like that going for 1.3 million, which I would tell you if you’re listening to this podcast, I don’t think a company pays $1.3 million for a domain name because they think it might be worth 1 billion, 350,000. And they’re hoping to make 50,000 on it.

    I think we’re still in a place where they’re thinking it’s going to be worth multiple million dollars to their enterprise or that they feel to be taken with, with the credibility that they want, that they just have to have it. And so I think, again, what I want to try to do a million dollar domains is provide these examples on our blog posts of the fact that there’s activity in the million dollar space every week.

    Let’s see. I have another link here to Amazon buying blink.com. So if you say, well, this is great for a regional bank, but what are the big companies doing? Well? We’ve got amazon.com and if they’re going to have a part of their company called blinked domain gang reports, The blink moved to escrow.com, which usually means that there’s a sale taking place.

    We don’t know for sure if it was amazon.com, but they do have a company that they do forward blink.com to blink for home.com, which is an Amazon company that sells security systems and cameras for home use. So if you’re benchmarking maybe the most successful company of the past 20 years in any industry, much less e-commerce or cloud hosting, they’ve got a company that they buy called blink for home, and they’re going to go ahead and buy blink.com because they want to, they want to be blink.com.

    They don’t want to be blinked for home docks on. And I think that if you’re trying to gain support for the purchase of a million dollar domain name in your company, this is the type of thing. You want to say that the largest, the most successful companies in the world are upgrading from three word domain names to one word, domain names.

    So I put the link on there and to finish up the links I had on there for last week. The one I wanted to mention, and then I’ll go to questions is facet wealth facet wealth. This is again from James Isles facet wealth acquires facet that come ahead of a hundred million dollar funding round.

    So facet is a subscription-based company where customers pay between 1800 to $6,000 per year. Prior to disclosing the funding Jamie’s doc found on, and he does a great job of finding these That they acquired the domain name, facet.com instead of being facet, wealth.com. And I think that again, if you’re going to raise a hundred million dollars, if you’re going to charge people 1500 to 6,000 a year, you know, to use the equivalent thing, you’re not going to be in a tiny office building on the edge of town.

    You’re going to be downtown in a class, a building you’re going to look the part. And I think for them, You know, whatever they paid, whether it was hundreds of thousands or as much as a million or maybe even over that for them, they wanted to be able to be facet.com for its functional use of being easy to remember.

    You’re not going to have people mistype it, say your facet, wealth.com. There’s a bunch of people who get substitutes for it. And even though you can Sue them, and even though you can try to take action against them, if someone buys typos of wealth, or if they buy facet wealth management, you just kinda deal with all that stuff.

    Instead of just being facet.com and, and, and being able to have that brand potentially applied to multiple parts of your business. I think here’s another example of a company going to raise a hundred million dollars, and then you have to ask them if they paid a million dollars for facet.com, were they better at spending that a hundred million dollars to spend 1% of it to upgrade from facet wealth to facet.

    And we don’t have an interview with them, but hopefully over time, I’ll be able to reach out to them or they’ll comment in public media. And we’ll see them comment on that. But anyway, I didn’t want to leave without at least giving you some hints of what my total number is. So I tried to accumulate and then we’ll get to questions.

    I tried to look at the top 60,000 domain names. I looked at the top 10,000 or 15,000 English words, and I estimated what they might be worth. I added to that, the value of all the three letter domain names, all the two letter domain names, all of the three number, domain names, all the four number, domain names I made some estimations of.

    You know, we all invest in two word domain names. And last year we started to see two word domain names, go for prices above a hundred thousand. So what I did was I imagined how many domain names of two words could sell for above a hundred thousand, how many could sell for 50,000? So I just randomized what I thought, you know, articles.

    You know, 1,002 word names that could sell for a hundred thousand dollars. Yes, I believe there are. If you think about names with E at the beginning, I, at the beginning, my, at the beginning two word domain names with high CPCs. So I made some assumptions. Then I took the list of all the sports in the world, all the fruits in the world, all the foods in the world, all the cities and the top 500 cities in the U S the top 50 cities globally, the top, the, all the countries in the world.

    And I just kept adding up at an average price of X. What would it be? And so far, I’m up to $16 billion of value based upon assumptions of just the top 15,000 English words, the top 10,000 imagined two word combination, domain name. And three letters and four letters and two letters and three numbers and four numbers and these other groups.

    So I’m going to slowly start adding to that number, to see what the number is approximately of the top maybe hundred thousand domain names. And what I want you to understand is if you’re, if you’re thinking about domain names and you’re listening to million-dollar domain names, and you say, I wonder how many there are, you’re still talking about me coming up with a hundred thousand names when there’s 115 million.com domain names registered.

    So when you’re talking with someone about a high quality domain name, realize that they may be holding one of a hundred, one of 500, one of a thousand in an asset class. That’s that exists with 150 million domain names registered. So hopefully we can get past this idea that domain names cost $9. And if you didn’t get one or you should be able to think up a word and get that domain name now no, 115 million people have thought up domain names and you may be inquiring in something that’s in the top point.

    Oh oh 1%. So I’ll share with you the methodology come to next week. I don’t mean to tease you, but I think my number is going to go up. I don’t know how high it’s going to go, but right now I’m at 16 billion. Anyway, Richard and Todd, how are you? Thanks for coming today. You guys have been great supportive of the show.

    I didn’t know if you had a comment or a question I can help you with.

    Well, I was waiting for Richard to go, but I’ll certainly talk. And that is, yeah. I want to hear what you heard from Michael Saylor. So I don’t have to listen to the whole thing. Please tell me some hot highlights from that. And also I wanted to say, oh yeah, about the HTTP and HTTPS. I have to do some code on every size to make sure when people go to one or the other, it goes to this secure site, right.

    When they go to the non-secure. But yeah, that’s always a crazy question, but so please, I just one thing about that blink, I was going to say, yeah, if I was ringing, I would tell people don’t blink. And, but then I realized they’re on both the same company. So now that doesn’t help for marketing. And when you said page about listening to this in years from.

    That really got me laughing a tiny bit. I’ll listen to this. Right. But Hey, so what’s going on with Michael Saylor, please? Don’t don’t overlook that. No. And thank you for, for, for, for bringing that up. So I, I really watched CNBC quite a bit, which is a us cable channel that focuses on business. And and as I mentioned last week, technology, isn’t a subset of business anymore.

    It is business and Michael Saylor has been one of the biggest advocates for Bitcoin, his company, micro strategy. Let me see if I got the number right today. They own let’s say I think they have 398,000 Bitcoin. And so to say he’s a proponent and an advocate is an understatement, and he’s been willing to be public about what he thinks is a transformative currency and his company he’s actually borrowed money on his company to buy more and more and more Bitcoin. So I think everyone’s been waiting to talk to him because Bitcoin’s down, you know, 30% or something since the beginning of the year.

    And so they had a good interview with them today. And he talked about He talked about, he did. I I’ll tell you one thing. He did Todd. He kept calling it digital property. And I think he purposefully is avoiding the word cryptocurrency. That’s one of the things I picked up and what he said was they said, what do you think is the biggest challenge for Bitcoin and micro strategy going forward?

    And he said, the world is, is reaching out to own a digital property that they can use to buy and sell goods. And I thought it was interesting where he didn’t use the word crypto that much or cryptocurrency he kept using digital property. I think he acknowledged the fact that a lot of the market is made up of people trading amongst themselves.

    He talks about exchanges and places where you can trade with 20 times leverage. So what that means is. Instead of thinking about Bitcoin trading at 37,000 today and saying, well, if I buy a Bitcoin or if I buy a hundred dollars in Bitcoin, you know, how much is it really going to move today? What he is talking about, people that, that are only having to put up 5% of the money of their trade and be able to, to basically for $5,000 control a hundred thousand a Bitcoin, and bet that it’s going to go up and bet that it’s going to go down.

    Now, the thing that happens is when there’s a move of more than 5%, those people have, they have their physician sold out from under them. And so it really exacerbates and, and brings about more More swings because it doesn’t matter if it’s like, if you owe money to your bookie and the bookie has your bank account and you lose a bat, the book he’s taking the money out of your bank account, and that’s what will happen if you’re betting 20 times, what you invested and your position goes against you to the point where the, the company that exchanged that you made the trade on says, we’re not, you know, you don’t have enough money in here to cover your.

    They’re going to sell you out of that position. It doesn’t matter if you love Bitcoin or hate Bitcoin. So I think you talked about that. He talked about the idea that you don’t have something called the wash sale rule in Bitcoin. And what that means is I can go on one exchange and make it look like I’m buying Bitcoin and I can go on another exchange and make it look like I’m selling Bitcoin.

    So I think he talked up a lot of the volatility to that, but he remains a longterm believer in Bitcoin. His company owns 398,000. They added a hundred or 53,000 Bitcoin last year. Most of his Bitcoin is leveraged, meaning he’s pledged as collateral for loans. But there’s 125,000. About a third of his Bitcoin that’s uncollateralized.

    So he considers that the true net worth of his company that he can do whatever he wants with. He really feels like for his company micro strategy, whose stock is down more than 50% that because the sec hasn’t decided with Bitcoin is. That it makes it very hard for him to do as accounting. Imagine if you were in the domain name, market, imagine if every month you had to report to your board, the results of your domain portfolio, and every month you had to value your domains as to what was their liquid value at the end of each month, that’s really what he has to do with Bitcoin.

    When Bitcoin’s up, it makes it look like just companies earning a huge amount of money. He has to account for what would happen to the taxes on that money. What would happen to his employee bonuses if he makes that much money. And then when Bitcoin goes down, he’s got an accounts. The loss of that money, he’s got to then re account for the taxes.

    And so this is me talking, not him. So I think that he sees the future of that. But in terms of Todd, whether he’s still a bull on Bitcoin, absolutely. He sees. And he quoted two analysts from Morgan Stanley as somewhere else. He really sees it as the only coin or currency that can be the world’s cryptocurrency.

    He still believes there is no number two. And so when he thinks about people around the world needing to have a digital property, he says it can only be Bitcoin and secondarily, he says that there’s a huge barrier to any company. Owning Bitcoin because of this mark to market thing. So even if you work Coca-Cola and you wanted to buy $10 million worth of Bitcoin, just in case you ever needed it, you’re finding your CFO is going to say, well, every month we have to mark this to market and it’s going to change our earnings.

    And that has nothing to do with our core business. So what he’s hoping is that the sec will let him call this Bitcoin property, like a real estate asset, where you only have to account for it when you realize the gain or you realize the loss. And the reason I thought that was important for domain investors is we have the same problem.

    It’s not clear whether a domain name is property that can be put on a balance sheet as an asset, or even an intangible property. You can, you can value it as an intangible property when you spend the money, but you have to amortize it, but what’s not clear is when it comes to legal settlements and things like that.

    And you talk about this probably in your legal room, whether it’s truly like a piece of property or is it an investment? You know what I mean? It has to be calculated like the share of stock. So I don’t know if that’s anything crazy. I thought he was very moderate in a national interview about his company.

    This is me talking Todd. He was not extreme. He was very pleasant and I think he did a good job. Of saying I’m a huge fan of Bitcoin, but not in a way that was like, oh, it’s, you know, a year ago at this time you had people like Bitcoin had to go to a million or else it wasn’t worth anything. I think he was just basically saying I’m comfortable with the company’s position.

    I think it’s the only asset. The only, you know, digital property, the world needs it. If it gets easier for companies to own, it should go up. He doesn’t have any debt coming due to 2025. So a lot of people think if he ever sells, it’s going to kill the market. He seems to be saying he doesn’t have to sell anything until 20, 25.

    And even the, the loan that he has coming due in 2025 is a convertible stock loan. So people may convert into a stock. So that’s my takeaway is it was a very moderate, mature You know, good representation of Bitcoin. And even though the anchor has wanted to kind of pile on, you know, I felt like they wanted to say, but it’s down, it’s down, you were wrong, you were wrong.

    But I think he just kept it on and it really even keel

    page. Thanks for that. I mean, I’m so glad I asked, because one, I didn’t want to just know a summary, really your perspective, and you added all that in your comments are wonderful, man. I appreciate it. And I wish, I wish it’s like, I wish I would have watched that with you like us watching a ball game. You could went, you know, he’s not seeing crypto.

    I’d go. I know he’s not sad, but no, I like those little things that you noticed, and it does make me want to look at it in, is it the serious thing about, you know, what you bring up so many points anyway, but the leverage she’s, that’s the ultra margin call. I don’t even know. I mean, I’m scared. I don’t even want to know the places where that you can, you can do that.

    I certainly wouldn’t go over there, but I’d be afraid I bring it up and somebody else would go down. I did it because a way that is. Scary to think they can leverage that much of Bitcoin, especially with that volatility. So yeah. Who knows what’s going to happen? He could still get slaughtered out there.

    Right. He could get that, all that, that he’s doing with, but going to get slaughtered, but he’s thinking it would have to be almost like a perfect storm and a lot of stuff happens, but we know what the tragedies, you know, big world events anything’s possible. But yeah, I I’m, I’m a believer in Bitcoin myself.

    So I think, you know, like you average in, and if it’s time for you to average out of some of it, go ahead. Except that’s how I would, I do with all my, get in a little bit and get out a little bit, but if you’re going to be exposed to any kind of a crypto Bitcoin and Ethereum are the way to go, but so he didn’t use the word Bitcoin, but a DM or I’m sorry, crypto, but did he used the word NFT at all paid?

    No, he didn’t. He kept, he used it when he talked about the world. And needing, you know, they used to talk about what’s the word that you use when you say the real value in Bitcoin is when people can use it to go to the store. What do they call it? Usability or utility utility. Yes, I think so. I think he still talked about that with digital property, but it was funny because his interview was, it wasn’t cut short.

    I mean, it was a full interview. It wasn’t even on the tech section. The thing I took from it also was that there’s a tech show every day on CNBC called tech checks from 10 to 11 central. And that’s where usually you’d expect him to be, but he was on the main squawk on the street. You know, the main section of the daytime programming, which I thought was.

    Kind of an upgrade, you know, from being in the section of the show that just deals with tech. But what’s funny was he hit his comfort is that interview was really overshadowed today by the news on PayPal. So PayPal came out last night and said, somehow that our numbers, we missed them by a mile. And PayPal is one of the most valuable companies on the whole New York stock exchange.

    And they’re down 25% today. Third down the high of the stock in the last year was 2 85. And they’re at one 30 today. And if you think a lot of domain investors, you know, we use PayPal a lot and they basically came out. For lack of a better word, said everything we’ve been telling you about our business is wrong.

    We’re not growing near as fast and people are just jettisoning it off their trading books. You know what I mean? I mean, can you imagine a company like PayPal could change 25% in a day, Todd, with that? If my advice on PayPal and I know, you know, I’m a financial advisor too. Of course I don’t do that anymore, but I just kept all my licenses page, you know?

    So I’m a registered investment advisor 25 years. Why just, for what reason? I don’t even know. I don’t mess with it, but yeah. So I guess legally I could give some advice or I’m licensed, but so I would say with PayPal, because I want to ask you about the GoDaddy stock and just a second, your opinion is yeah, one 30 down 45 today.

    45 bucks. You are at 25%. Well, I would say one definitely don’t touch it. I wouldn’t touch the stock. I think it’s this, this is the beginning of the big fall apart for PayPal and nothing against PayPal, PayPal already kicked everybody’s ass for years. It’s just, the competition is changing and PayPal is going to start letting the see through a lot of the holes in what they’ve done.

    And I just don’t think there’s anything positive, but it’s basically time to either buy in. People are gonna think, or in my opinion, just keep getting the hell out. So, well, let me, let me jump in there. So yeah, this is not a stock investment show. What I wanted to talk about was the fact that so PayPal was already down 120 bucks a share along with all the other w what they call the, you know, the COVID stocks, you know, zoom and DocuSign and all the companies that were going to change the world, because everyone worked at home.

    To me, it signaled. That maybe we’re going to go back to normal. See, and that, you know, I think a lot of the PayPal story has to do with the fact that, that they’re finally having to show the fact that they’re not getting every eBay transaction. If you do business on eBay, now you don’t get paid from PayPal and your customers pay without PayPal.

    And so, but what I really wanted to say was, I think it’s a sign of the change from this stay at home. COVID new world economy of the past two years. And for those of you that are domain investors and especially million dollar domain investors, you may have a very short window to go in to what have traditionally been huge markets like travel and services and dining out that I think.

    Have been really hurt the past couple of years. And I think we’re starting to see a change. You’re starting to see us potentially move from a goods based economy. You know, you’re making your own food at home. It put a burden on the supply chain back to a services and I want to pay to have a done economy.

    And when it comes to travel and having things done for you, that’s what I wanted to mention. And I think, I don’t think PayPal is related to that, but I think that it’s part of this big shift. So. And million dollar domains. That means that you may have a unique opportunity to buy one word domain names in these spaces before a seller realizes that it’s coming back.

    And at the same point, if you’re a seller who’s held through this period, that things may be optimistically changing, and it didn’t matter if a company wanted to buy vacations.com, could you really do it in the middle of a pandemic? Or did you need to see your bookings go up? You need to see, you know some hint that people are traveling again before you made a big multi-million dollar investment in a domain name in the space.

    So I think this year we’re going to see normalcy and the shift might be from goods based to services based. So that’s my big picture comment.

    Great show. Okay. And I did ask that, but reason I said about GoDaddy stock, just your perspective, because you know, it’s been out everybody. If anybody wants to know, came out what at 25 bucks, that’s when I got a bunch and I held it since I thought it was going to be two 50 by now 300. It’s still it’s in the 70 to 80 range.

    It’s silly. I mean, it really upsets me, but any comments on that page, I think it’s a great diversification tool. If you’re a domain investor to own the companies that you’re giving all your money. To own Verisign potentially because every domain name that you own Verisign is getting $6 and 85 cents or whatever.

    And their profit margins are 60%. So if you think about it, you’re going to be a domain investor, and you’re going to constantly renew your names. At least if you own stock embarrass sign, now that’s the logic in me. Then I go to buy Verisign and it’s trading at like 51 times earnings, and you’re paying this on godly $20 billion valuation.

    And that’s why I’ve never been able to buy it. So I’d say the same thing about GoDaddy. I think it would be great to own who you’re sending your money to, but then you start saying, oh my gosh, I’m going to pay a hundred dollars for a company that on my a hundred dollars is going to earn $2 next year.

    Right. So, you know, It’s going to take you a lot of years for that company to earn enough to pay back what you invested in the stock. So I’m just out, you know, I’m just out.

    All right. Well, listen, I was hoping Monte may join us and I want to just check and see if he came in. He didn’t, but I want to give anyone, who’s got a room, Todd. I know you’ve got your legal room and your marijuana business room this week. You wanna refresh everybody on what times those are? Yeah.

    And I did want to make a comment about the R O T D auction. You know, Monte’s always done things. I mean, basically I’m so happy that he’s stayed in the domaining industry because he could go in a lot of different spaces and he is running those or doing something with that hip hop. But I know, you know him much better than me.

    I’ve just always, I admire his toughness. I was joking around one time saying about. Chuck Ladelle, but he’s not, he’s not retired. Chuck’s old. And he’s some, money’s tougher than that is what I say. But about the terms I’m proud. I’m happy that you brought that up because a lot of people they’re new in the space and they want to submit a good name to auction.

    Yeah. There are some terms to be aware of, but you’re a grown person Monnie knows. I mean, Monnie knows the best way for him to run his business and he keeps everything upfront, but that’s the, always the negative people. I didn’t know that they still had rights to my name a month after. Yeah. Cause he’s marketing.

    And if you’ve got a good name, yeah. It may be a year. He may want rights because he may think, you know what, I’m going to help this person sell this name with my 25 years of experience. And he knows everybody. So you’re lucky if he accepts your stuff. And if you’re like, well, I’m not sure about the terms, read them beforehand.

    You’ll be fine. But like I said, you’re lucky to be part of it. I’ve sold names through his auctions, always happy, but you know, I was like everybody else through. They accepted them. Okay. And my profile, you can see, I got a room today, marijuana business, and this is not in the domain space, it’s in the marijuana space.

    And it really perturbs me. I was going to say, today is today is at 3:00 PM Pacific, but it’s really about in, in California. And now in Oregon, there’s all sorts of new bills that are people wanting to pass it. If you grow marijuana unregulated that you need to be locked up even longer, it needs to be felonies.

    This, this, and this. And I’m going to finish by saying, cause this is not the spaces. If you’re someone who wants people to be locked up because they’re growing weed or selling weed, I don’t care if it’s with a license or not. Yes. I have a, you know, that’s a problem with me and there’s people within the marijuana space who were wanting that for their brethren, for their brothers.

    So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. The seriousness of that, and just I, I appreciate this room was fantastic. Thanks for you know, allow me to chime in a little. Thanks Todd. Hey Jeff. I know you’ve got a room this week and we had a great little pre-show room earlier, so real quickly. I’ve just got a little bit, oh wow.

    Quick, quick question. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to ask you a quick, quick question, but after that one for next week with million dollar domains, because it’s related to million dollar domains yeah, I’ll wait till next week to take an action, but anyway, yes, we have talking domains on a Thursday, four o’clock Eastern standard time.

    Tired on my left hand side is my cohort wing man with talking domains. We’ve been going strong since may of last year. It’s been a great room, a great time field each and every Thursday consistently with friends like Paige and others that come into the room. So I hope to meet some new friends, this coming Thursday, tomorrow, four o’clock Eastern standard time page.

    Hope you can drop by for a quick minute as well. Maybe I’ll ask my question. Well, fantastic. Thanks Jeff. And thank everybody for coming in to million dollar domains today. If you want to listen to a recording it’s either on, on domain.club or you can click the clubhouse recording. I talked about six or seven articles.

    I talked about the reasons why you might want to buy a million dollar domain name. I talked a little bit about Bitcoin from an interview I saw with Michael Saylor micro strategy today. And I talked about a project I’m working on to come up with what is the value of a certain subset of what I consider a million dollar domain names.

    And so far I’m up to $16 billion and I think the number’s going to go higher. And what I hope to do is I hope to be able to compute the number in a way that I can also. Show changes to that number. Based upon the current sales results of million dollar domains as they occur throughout the year.

    So right now I’m at 16 billion. I’ll share with you some of the calculations and assumptions behind that, but 16 billion, I think there’s some phrases out there, you know, a nickel here, a nickel there, and pretty soon it amounts to serious money. So now that may be what an NFT could raise in an hour and a half for all I know, but but it’s quite a bit of money just for rod domains.

    Certainly thanks everybody for coming in today. We’ll see all thank you page. Great rum. Love it. Thanks. Appreciate the support.

Startup Club’s Best 25 Must-Read Books for Aspiring Entrepreneurs in 2025

1. The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries 2. Zero to One: Notes on Startups,...

Business Mindset: Starting vs Scaling

The journey from starting a business to scaling it is as much about mindset as it is about strategy. When you're in the startup...

Minor Majors for Maximum Impact

This week, we explored the transformative concept of "micro moves," small yet impactful actions that can propel a startup toward success. As co-host Michele...

Startup Secrets: Scale with AI

In this episode, we sat down with Jose Moreno, founder of Neulight and a veteran of big tech companies like Microsoft and Netflix. Jose...

Boss vs. Coach: Leadership Balance

The entrepreneurial journey is a demanding one, requiring founders to wear multiple hats as they navigate the complexities of launching, scaling, and managing a...

Timing the Sale of Your Company

Timing is everything when it comes to selling your company. In fact, 50% of the value you receive from a sale can hinge on...