Thoughts

Andrew Miller

August 17, 2025

Domain Names are Digital Real Estate

Barry Diller once said, “build brands, not bricks”. Big Ideas always leverage the best land, locations, and addresses. Category defining and exact match domain names are essentially the most valuable and reputable digital locations. Just like “Wall Street,” “Madison Avenue,” or “Napa” instantly signal finance, advertising, or wine in the physical world, Invest*com, Advertise*com, and Wine*com serve as their online equivalents. These domains signal category ownership, convey instant trust and credibility, and reduce friction because customers already know what the brand is about the moment they see or hear it. That’s why the most valuable one word .com domains command such high values; they function the same way prime physical real estate does in the offline world. A great domain is digital location equity, just like a flagship store on Fifth Avenue is physical location equity. It is no accident that the most successful, visionary entrepreneurs of the current digital age understand this. After I oversaw the sale of Chat*com to Hubspot Founder Dharmesh Shah for $15.5m, he was able to parlay that into equity in OpenAI, followed by Hubspot becoming one of OpenAi’s most important strategic partners. He also acquired Agent*com/Agent.ai, and in several short months, has surpassed 2m users. Another business built on the trust and power of these two domain acquisitions. We have seen the same with Elon Musk, who acquired Tesla*com as the exact match upgrade from TeslaMotors*com, and X*com to rebrand Twitter. Lastly, in another one of our deals, Rocket Mortgage stepped up and paid $15m for Rocket*com, re-branding to the exact match with 2 moving Super Bowl ads. We are overseeing more and more of these transactions every week. For all the domains we represent or own, visit https://lnkd.in/eF9YJEbC

A Great Domain Won’t Save a Subpar Business

Above aside, it is also important to point out something I often say, which is “a bad product or business will not be saved by its exact match or category domain, but a strong product or business will get an exponential lift and value across all facets of its business from the domain”.

Thomas.com – Sold!

Another win for my great friend, long term client, and domain investor extraordinaire Yinan Wang this week, as we oversaw the sale of the Thomas*com domain in a win-win for the buyer and seller. As I noted last week, it is exciting times and I expect some mega domain deals in the coming months of 2025, as well as my soon to be ability to reveal the high 7 figure and 8 figure transaction price of 2 deals, both which will land in the top 3 publicly reported sales of 2025.

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