6 ms·

WW.com Sold in Private

58 points by larrys 12y ago

larrys 12y ago
Perhaps if Jacques is not willing to give the price that he sold the name for he could mention the % that the broker received for the sale and/or the gross commission. Edit: I'm curious why the HN handle of the seller was removed from the post. To me that is an added point of interest and relevant.
- dang 12y ago
  In general, HN tries to emphasize content, not personalities. So this was a clear case for reverting to the article title, even though you're right that jacquesm is the only reason why people here (including me!) would find it interesting. It sometime happens that a story makes it to the front page because of some bait that was added to the title (in this case, to add social interest where intellectual interest was lacking), whereupon a moderator removes the bait from the title. This is not a bad pattern if you think about it. It's ok for the front page to have a few such stories, but they shouldn't dominate it. And once a story makes the front page, it should stand on its own.
  - larrys 12y ago
    In this case I agree with you (stands on its own) but otoh I think in terms of some of the major contributors to HN a less interesting story is often worth reading just for that fact. As the person who posted the story I would have posted it regardless of whether Jacques was involved or not. But of course I definitely recognized that if I included his name it would have a much better chance of garnering interest.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    I totally agree with the sentiment here, applying that even-handedly is going to be hard though. Plenty of articles about frequent HN contributors had the HN handle in the title, and in the future you're going to have to decide between 'original titles only' and this 'emphasize content, not personalities' policy. Two samples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4328367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4328367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3214397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3214397 But those were not on 'your watch' so I'm 100% on board with your new policy. Quite a few blog posts carry the name of the blogger in the domain as well, which emphasizes personality rather than content, that's going to be harder to get rid of. Anyway, I didn't even expect this to be on HN at all, it's been a roller coaster month of negotiations and traveling, I'm happy it's done. Now to repair the website, amazing how many dependencies on a domain name creep in over the years!
- jacquesm 12y ago
  That's not really fair to Tom, (since it might affect his ability to negotiate in the future), but let's just say that I would happily recommend him to anybody, his rates are reasonable and he works really hard (which in the world of brokers is a welcome change). We got close to selling 3 times, and in the end I got a deal that I'm pretty happy with. Let's just say that since I bought ww.com with the proceeds of gameplay.com, which in turn I bought for $12 I would be highly surprised if I ever say that kind of ROI again in my life.
  - larrys 12y ago
    I own one of these things as well. For the benefit of others on HN although I've never received a quote from a broker to market a 2l which I own I have on other domains. Generally anywhere from 7 to 15%. I've also had brokers take a haircut to close a deal. On the buy side godaddy had recently sold one of my names (I almost blew them off but found they were clueless enough that it really worked to my advantage) and I'm seeing they get 10% when they represent sellers.
  - haptiK 12y ago
    It says on your own website that WW.com it was sold for 3000000. I'm confused.
    - larrys 12y ago
      That was his asking price.
      - general_failure 12y ago
        whoa, we have a milionaire in our midst. Is that 30 million!?
        CanSpice 12y ago
        No, it's three million.
drcode 12y ago
Seems like a bad time to be buying domains, since the new TLDs are going to shift the supply/demand landscape.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  Which is exactly why I decided to sell.
  - ohashi 12y ago
    Congrats on the sale.
  - larrys 12y ago
    I'd be curious if you could do a post on that. I'm in the business and while I can't predict the future I don't see it that way. At least in the short term long term of course anything is possible obviously. While to others it might sound like you are taking a hit my guess is that you simply got a good enough number that you decided not to go for door number two. Which could be 5 years down the road or never. The market for this type of name is basically the following: a) A non chinese domain investor (good luck getting anything north of 350k from one of those). b) A chinese investor (in which case all bets are off after all they buy numeral domains for ridiculous amounts). I've sold to a ton of these guys. c) A startup (but not going to pay a million for a domain). d) Some company that needs those initials. e) Some major company that needs a brand name. And hopefully doesn't have a trademark but has a budget. As such (as we both know) you can wait forever for the right person or company to come along. So if someone throws you a million(s) for the name you are going to think long and hard about not taking the money. And the fact that, say, some billion dollar company wants it doesn't mean they will part with millions to buy it. Anyway congratulations.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      Let me think about that. This has been a long time in the works (years), and it's been an interesting but sometimes tiring affair. The obvious candidates to buy it have all had their chance, compared to what other 2L domains have sold for I think my asking price was quite reasonable. I think I understand why this particular party bought it and what their strategy is, so I understand the deal from the buyers perspective in so far as this is possible. For my side the short version of the story is risk/return analysis, I've made a good bit of money from the exploitation of the domain, I could have kept it and re-targeted it to some new purpose or sell it outright and re-invest the proceeds in some other way. Domains are a fickle thing, you're always operating by the grace of some other party. Another way to look at this transaction is that the sale of the domain instantly brought about 20 years worth of revenues without the associated costs. I've got many other reasons for selling, after all, a two letter domain is 'just 16 bits' and I think bits have in the end limited utility, as a brand it was useful but not spectacularly so. Though no doubt someone else could have milked it for much more (for instance, by making it a porn site). I'm fairly tired of the whole webcam concept (no matter what you do, it tends to trend to a porn site unless you feel like babysitting it 24x7) and have been very busy with other concepts in the last couple of months. The Due-Diligence work is also quite demanding, letting this go to me was not hard once the decision was made. I will miss my ultra-short email address. I'll do what I can to keep the users happy and the site up in the air, the deserve nothing less, their loyalty over the years has been astounding.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- jacquesm 12y ago
  I never cared one bit about SEO so whatever it does it does. I started alerting the users many months ago that a shift was imminent and the traffic has dropped a bit but not in a terrible way. Many people had already fixed their links and I suspect the remainder will do so shortly. Of course there will be a permanent hit from this, the new (actually, the old) domain is a lot harder to remember than the one that just sold.
crisnoble 12y ago
I just went to ww.com, clicked translate and it said the following (originally in Chinese) "Your domain name is for sale. A good domain only have the economic strength and strategic vision of the business or individual reservations!" Was this what jacquesm had on there or is this post aquisition? For some reason I found it quite funny.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  Yes, it's funny, and that's post acquisition. Let me explain what drives this process. The buyer here is a Chinese company that somehow magically can move millions of $US to the other side of the world. Most Chinese companies, even those that have lots of $US can not do that, they run into the $50K/year barrier that the Chinese central bank has set up. So by buying domains abroad and then offering them to Chinese buyers that can not move their $ outside of China these people will make a substantial profit on their deal. And I don't think it takes too much imagination to figure out why they can move money out of China when everybody else can not.
  - samstave 12y ago
    Corruption?
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      More or less, yes. My take on this is that if they allowed people to wire all that money back out for goods that it would turn out that not all the money is there anymore. It's very nice to look at all your dollars in a Chinese bank account when you can't do anything with them unless you go through the 'happy few'. Think of the effect a bank run would have if all those people demanded to actually see their dollars ostensibly kept in Chinese dollar accounts. That would have some interesting effects, but I hope the day will not come while I'm alive.
      - gabemart 12y ago
        It's none of my business, but to an outsider it seems like you're being extremely frank about this whole thing.
unreal37 12y ago
Congrats to one of my favorite HN contributors. Hope you got something close to what you were asking. Now if I can only sell my 2 letter domain for that...
- jacquesm 12y ago
  > Now if I can only sell my 2 letter domain for that... I'm pretty sure you could. What domain do you have?
  - larrys 12y ago
    I understand that you said your broker did a good job for you so I'm sure others would want to contact him. For example the parent commenter. But if you follow the links the site premiumurls.net redirects to twitter and the whois info is private (and why does it need to be?) If he is really good at what he does then why is that, other than trying to operate in some kind of stealth mode? How did you hear about him originally I can't find out that much about him. (I am finding that history records indicate a woman was attached to that domain name and it seems odd that someone would pick a .net like that..)
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      tom at premiumurls dot net Feel free to refer to me as the link-up (or reference this thread). I completely understand someone that does not have a very public service in a high stakes market. Being extremely visible is not always helpful. But he's earned his spot in the light on this one and since it's easy to find him through tfa I'm sure he's ok with his contact info being listed here.
bokusiayam 12y ago
Outside of the get rich quick dopes who think they're going to strike it big, who cares about this? If I wanted to read about vapid people concerned only with making money out of thin air while doing nothing useful, I'd be reading SEO blogs. "It's worth a lot of money because people pay for it!!" is a pathetic excuse to give attention to something, especially on a site ostensibly for people with active brain cells.
- josephschmoe 12y ago
  Yo.
67726e 12y ago
The exact same concept as holding onto a parking spot and waiting for someone to come along and pay for it. Despicable. I read most everything jacquesm writes and enjoy it, but how can you justify rent-seeking on a public resource?
- jacquesm 12y ago
  You do realize that that 'parking spot' has had my highest income website on it for over a decade with about 100K visitors daily even at the low times? Also, I'm not sure what you mean with 'public resource' in this context, domains are more like private registries held by semi-official companies that you can choose to do business with or not. There is a near infinity of them, shorter ones are obviously in short supply but to date I've never ever had a problem buying a domain for a new project for $8 or so.
  - 67726e 12y ago
    In that case, my apologies, this is the edge-case of a domain-transfer of a domain that was truly being used. The way I had read things, it sounded as though you parked a two-letter domain on a sketchy web-cam site. And regarding the public resource, it really is a public resource. You may have to go through a registrar, but it is open for any and all to register. In the case of "squatters", it is the same as attempting to rent a parking space. Something meant for the public to use which requires a nominal fee.
    - bcohen5055 12y ago
      I'd say it's closer to real estate than a parking spot... Think of a book store that has a great business but it is located in the middle of a bar district. At some point the property is more valuable than the business and it makes sense to sell it so someone else can develop a business that better leverages the location.
      - jacquesm 12y ago
        That is by far the best explanation, better than I could have said it myself. Thank you, you nailed it perfectly.
general_failure 12y ago
Why doesn't someone have a cap on domain name sales? What sense does it make to make this some sort of land grab promoting squatters. (note that ww.com was not squatted on, i know that. i am just asking in general why a price cap is a bad idea for resale.)
- fiatmoney 12y ago
  A cap would be impossible to enforce; ICANN can't monitor someone forking over the cap + a briefcase of cash between two buyers god only knows where. And super-valuable domains are minuscule portion of overall domain sales, it simply wouldn't be worthwhile. And it need not be a "sale of a domain" at all; it can be the sale of "ww.com corp", which owns the domain, without any domain transfer at all.
- joelrunyon 12y ago
  Are there caps on any other purchases out there? Should we start capping the amounts that startups can be acquired for? If FB is willing to pay 1B for Instagram, 19B for Whatsapp, or more - who's to say that they can't spend their money the way they want to?
  - general_failure 12y ago
    Well, if we start treating domain names as a public resource, then caps might start making more sense. It's like any other regulation. AFAIK, there are regulations already for how much you can pollute your environment, usage of rivers, height of buildings, rearchitecting your house etc.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  For one caps are absolutely non-enforceable, second it would be setting a pretty bad precedent to retro-actively set a cap on something long after the trading has started. I'm not aware of a precedent like that. Imagine a cap on land prices. Or a cap on gold or any other good that is freely traded. Next thing you know you're going to have to declare your 'five year plan' when you register a domain...

58 points by larrys 12y ago

Perhaps if Jacques is not willing to give the price that he sold the name for he could mention the % that the broker received for the sale and/or the gross commission. Edit: I'm curious why the HN handle of the seller was removed from the post. To me that is an added point of interest and relevant.

dang 12y ago
In general, HN tries to emphasize content, not personalities. So this was a clear case for reverting to the article title, even though you're right that jacquesm is the only reason why people here (including me!) would find it interesting. It sometime happens that a story makes it to the front page because of some bait that was added to the title (in this case, to add social interest where intellectual interest was lacking), whereupon a moderator removes the bait from the title. This is not a bad pattern if you think about it. It's ok for the front page to have a few such stories, but they shouldn't dominate it. And once a story makes the front page, it should stand on its own.
- larrys 12y ago
  In this case I agree with you (stands on its own) but otoh I think in terms of some of the major contributors to HN a less interesting story is often worth reading just for that fact. As the person who posted the story I would have posted it regardless of whether Jacques was involved or not. But of course I definitely recognized that if I included his name it would have a much better chance of garnering interest.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  I totally agree with the sentiment here, applying that even-handedly is going to be hard though. Plenty of articles about frequent HN contributors had the HN handle in the title, and in the future you're going to have to decide between 'original titles only' and this 'emphasize content, not personalities' policy. Two samples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4328367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4328367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3214397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3214397 But those were not on 'your watch' so I'm 100% on board with your new policy. Quite a few blog posts carry the name of the blogger in the domain as well, which emphasizes personality rather than content, that's going to be harder to get rid of. Anyway, I didn't even expect this to be on HN at all, it's been a roller coaster month of negotiations and traveling, I'm happy it's done. Now to repair the website, amazing how many dependencies on a domain name creep in over the years!
jacquesm 12y ago
That's not really fair to Tom, (since it might affect his ability to negotiate in the future), but let's just say that I would happily recommend him to anybody, his rates are reasonable and he works really hard (which in the world of brokers is a welcome change). We got close to selling 3 times, and in the end I got a deal that I'm pretty happy with. Let's just say that since I bought ww.com with the proceeds of gameplay.com, which in turn I bought for $12 I would be highly surprised if I ever say that kind of ROI again in my life.
- larrys 12y ago
  I own one of these things as well. For the benefit of others on HN although I've never received a quote from a broker to market a 2l which I own I have on other domains. Generally anywhere from 7 to 15%. I've also had brokers take a haircut to close a deal. On the buy side godaddy had recently sold one of my names (I almost blew them off but found they were clueless enough that it really worked to my advantage) and I'm seeing they get 10% when they represent sellers.
- haptiK 12y ago
  It says on your own website that WW.com it was sold for 3000000. I'm confused.
  - larrys 12y ago
    That was his asking price.
    - general_failure 12y ago
      whoa, we have a milionaire in our midst. Is that 30 million!?
      - CanSpice 12y ago
        No, it's three million.

drcode 12y ago

Seems like a bad time to be buying domains, since the new TLDs are going to shift the supply/demand landscape.

jacquesm 12y ago
Which is exactly why I decided to sell.
- ohashi 12y ago
  Congrats on the sale.
- larrys 12y ago
  I'd be curious if you could do a post on that. I'm in the business and while I can't predict the future I don't see it that way. At least in the short term long term of course anything is possible obviously. While to others it might sound like you are taking a hit my guess is that you simply got a good enough number that you decided not to go for door number two. Which could be 5 years down the road or never. The market for this type of name is basically the following: a) A non chinese domain investor (good luck getting anything north of 350k from one of those). b) A chinese investor (in which case all bets are off after all they buy numeral domains for ridiculous amounts). I've sold to a ton of these guys. c) A startup (but not going to pay a million for a domain). d) Some company that needs those initials. e) Some major company that needs a brand name. And hopefully doesn't have a trademark but has a budget. As such (as we both know) you can wait forever for the right person or company to come along. So if someone throws you a million(s) for the name you are going to think long and hard about not taking the money. And the fact that, say, some billion dollar company wants it doesn't mean they will part with millions to buy it. Anyway congratulations.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    Let me think about that. This has been a long time in the works (years), and it's been an interesting but sometimes tiring affair. The obvious candidates to buy it have all had their chance, compared to what other 2L domains have sold for I think my asking price was quite reasonable. I think I understand why this particular party bought it and what their strategy is, so I understand the deal from the buyers perspective in so far as this is possible. For my side the short version of the story is risk/return analysis, I've made a good bit of money from the exploitation of the domain, I could have kept it and re-targeted it to some new purpose or sell it outright and re-invest the proceeds in some other way. Domains are a fickle thing, you're always operating by the grace of some other party. Another way to look at this transaction is that the sale of the domain instantly brought about 20 years worth of revenues without the associated costs. I've got many other reasons for selling, after all, a two letter domain is 'just 16 bits' and I think bits have in the end limited utility, as a brand it was useful but not spectacularly so. Though no doubt someone else could have milked it for much more (for instance, by making it a porn site). I'm fairly tired of the whole webcam concept (no matter what you do, it tends to trend to a porn site unless you feel like babysitting it 24x7) and have been very busy with other concepts in the last couple of months. The Due-Diligence work is also quite demanding, letting this go to me was not hard once the decision was made. I will miss my ultra-short email address. I'll do what I can to keep the users happy and the site up in the air, the deserve nothing less, their loyalty over the years has been astounding.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

jacquesm 12y ago
I never cared one bit about SEO so whatever it does it does. I started alerting the users many months ago that a shift was imminent and the traffic has dropped a bit but not in a terrible way. Many people had already fixed their links and I suspect the remainder will do so shortly. Of course there will be a permanent hit from this, the new (actually, the old) domain is a lot harder to remember than the one that just sold.

crisnoble 12y ago

I just went to ww.com, clicked translate and it said the following (originally in Chinese) "Your domain name is for sale. A good domain only have the economic strength and strategic vision of the business or individual reservations!" Was this what jacquesm had on there or is this post aquisition? For some reason I found it quite funny.

jacquesm 12y ago
Yes, it's funny, and that's post acquisition. Let me explain what drives this process. The buyer here is a Chinese company that somehow magically can move millions of $US to the other side of the world. Most Chinese companies, even those that have lots of $US can not do that, they run into the $50K/year barrier that the Chinese central bank has set up. So by buying domains abroad and then offering them to Chinese buyers that can not move their $ outside of China these people will make a substantial profit on their deal. And I don't think it takes too much imagination to figure out why they can move money out of China when everybody else can not.
- samstave 12y ago
  Corruption?
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    More or less, yes. My take on this is that if they allowed people to wire all that money back out for goods that it would turn out that not all the money is there anymore. It's very nice to look at all your dollars in a Chinese bank account when you can't do anything with them unless you go through the 'happy few'. Think of the effect a bank run would have if all those people demanded to actually see their dollars ostensibly kept in Chinese dollar accounts. That would have some interesting effects, but I hope the day will not come while I'm alive.
    - gabemart 12y ago
      It's none of my business, but to an outsider it seems like you're being extremely frank about this whole thing.

unreal37 12y ago

Congrats to one of my favorite HN contributors. Hope you got something close to what you were asking. Now if I can only sell my 2 letter domain for that...

jacquesm 12y ago
> Now if I can only sell my 2 letter domain for that... I'm pretty sure you could. What domain do you have?
- larrys 12y ago
  I understand that you said your broker did a good job for you so I'm sure others would want to contact him. For example the parent commenter. But if you follow the links the site premiumurls.net redirects to twitter and the whois info is private (and why does it need to be?) If he is really good at what he does then why is that, other than trying to operate in some kind of stealth mode? How did you hear about him originally I can't find out that much about him. (I am finding that history records indicate a woman was attached to that domain name and it seems odd that someone would pick a .net like that..)
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    tom at premiumurls dot net Feel free to refer to me as the link-up (or reference this thread). I completely understand someone that does not have a very public service in a high stakes market. Being extremely visible is not always helpful. But he's earned his spot in the light on this one and since it's easy to find him through tfa I'm sure he's ok with his contact info being listed here.

bokusiayam 12y ago

Outside of the get rich quick dopes who think they're going to strike it big, who cares about this? If I wanted to read about vapid people concerned only with making money out of thin air while doing nothing useful, I'd be reading SEO blogs. "It's worth a lot of money because people pay for it!!" is a pathetic excuse to give attention to something, especially on a site ostensibly for people with active brain cells.

josephschmoe 12y ago
Yo.

67726e 12y ago

The exact same concept as holding onto a parking spot and waiting for someone to come along and pay for it. Despicable. I read most everything jacquesm writes and enjoy it, but how can you justify rent-seeking on a public resource?

jacquesm 12y ago
You do realize that that 'parking spot' has had my highest income website on it for over a decade with about 100K visitors daily even at the low times? Also, I'm not sure what you mean with 'public resource' in this context, domains are more like private registries held by semi-official companies that you can choose to do business with or not. There is a near infinity of them, shorter ones are obviously in short supply but to date I've never ever had a problem buying a domain for a new project for $8 or so.
- 67726e 12y ago
  In that case, my apologies, this is the edge-case of a domain-transfer of a domain that was truly being used. The way I had read things, it sounded as though you parked a two-letter domain on a sketchy web-cam site. And regarding the public resource, it really is a public resource. You may have to go through a registrar, but it is open for any and all to register. In the case of "squatters", it is the same as attempting to rent a parking space. Something meant for the public to use which requires a nominal fee.
  - bcohen5055 12y ago
    I'd say it's closer to real estate than a parking spot... Think of a book store that has a great business but it is located in the middle of a bar district. At some point the property is more valuable than the business and it makes sense to sell it so someone else can develop a business that better leverages the location.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      That is by far the best explanation, better than I could have said it myself. Thank you, you nailed it perfectly.

general_failure 12y ago

Why doesn't someone have a cap on domain name sales? What sense does it make to make this some sort of land grab promoting squatters. (note that ww.com was not squatted on, i know that. i am just asking in general why a price cap is a bad idea for resale.)

fiatmoney 12y ago
A cap would be impossible to enforce; ICANN can't monitor someone forking over the cap + a briefcase of cash between two buyers god only knows where. And super-valuable domains are minuscule portion of overall domain sales, it simply wouldn't be worthwhile. And it need not be a "sale of a domain" at all; it can be the sale of "ww.com corp", which owns the domain, without any domain transfer at all.
joelrunyon 12y ago
Are there caps on any other purchases out there? Should we start capping the amounts that startups can be acquired for? If FB is willing to pay 1B for Instagram, 19B for Whatsapp, or more - who's to say that they can't spend their money the way they want to?
- general_failure 12y ago
  Well, if we start treating domain names as a public resource, then caps might start making more sense. It's like any other regulation. AFAIK, there are regulations already for how much you can pollute your environment, usage of rivers, height of buildings, rearchitecting your house etc.
jacquesm 12y ago
For one caps are absolutely non-enforceable, second it would be setting a pretty bad precedent to retro-actively set a cap on something long after the trading has started. I'm not aware of a precedent like that. Imagine a cap on land prices. Or a cap on gold or any other good that is freely traded. Next thing you know you're going to have to declare your 'five year plan' when you register a domain...