Thoughts

Andrew Miller

March 31, 2024

Your Domain Name is no Trivial Matter

 I speak and write often about the most valuable premium .com domain names, and have done so for what is pushing 26 years; how they are the best standalone ROI of any asset class, “if” one understands the liquidity challenges; how both category defining and exact match domains provide a category leader with the authority, credibility, and memorability to reach the next level of its business and enterprise value; and, how they are game-changing across all facets of the business. We have oodles of founder/ceo case studies, including my own operating company exits. But this week, I experienced an absolutely classic example of what can happen if a company is using a secondary TLD or a non-exact match domain, Let me set the stage. On Tuesday, I started to receive countless emails asking for various things regarding a new trivia game or product. 10 emails became 100+ in 2 days so I responded to some to get to the bottom of it. It turns out, legendary Jeopardy champion Alex Jacob was back on the TV show this week for a champions tournament and mentioned his product SchoolofTrivia*com. No one heard the “school of ” and just assumed it was Trivia*com, a domain which we are overseeing. And the result was 100’s of emails. This happens on a much larger scale with multi-million dollar advertising campaigns and has even occurred from a $30m Super Bowl spend. CEOs, Founders, can you afford to become commercially successful and have your customers go to .com vs. io, or the exact match like SchoolofTrivia? Can you risk confidential emails being sent to the exact match .com by mistake because it happens with every single domain, sometimes by internal management of the company not using the exact match. The unequivocal answer is NO. All of Hilco Digital Assets premium domains can be found at HilcoDigital.com/domains.

Will the Concept of Domain Name IPO’s Take Off?

Last week, I participated in the IPO on Rally for the MJ*com domain name. I posted why I participated that day. Will domain name IPO’s become a viable long term solution for more liquidity in the asset class? Maybe, maybe not but I am certainly all about supporting avenues that I believe may lead to that result. This was not about the price of the MJ*com name, and whether I was buying at the bottom, but an investment in the future of our amazing domain name industry, and to learn about other asset classes that Hilco is involved with that may have application to working with Rally.

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