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UK based charity AutismRocks.com purchases Autism.rocks for $100k

Discussion in 'Domain Research' started by domainseller200, Jun 29, 2015.

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  1. domainseller200 United Kingdom

    domainseller200 Well-Known Member

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    AutismRocks.com recently paid $100,000 for the domain name Autism.rocks and are now redirecting their .com domain to their newly acquired Autism.rocks domain name.

    They obviously don't see .com as king; a bold move on their behalf? To me this seems a very strange thing to do, let alone spending $100,000 for the privilege also.

    The purchaser is a very successful trader who is the boss of Solo Capital and operates from Solo.com (which he purchased in late 2011 for $133k) which is why this purchase and decision to redirect the .com has surprised me even more.
     
  2. Domain Forum

    Acorn Domains Elite Member

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    IWA Meetup
     
  3. Murray

    Murray Well-Known Member

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    Good to see they're using their donations wisely :shock:
     
  4. monaghan United Kingdom

    monaghan Well-Known Member

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    Just what I was thinking
     
  5. ian

    ian Well-Known Member

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    Still using the .com email address!

    I truly hope that donations made have not paid for this ridiculous acquisition!
     
  6. Retired_Member42

    Retired_Member42 Retired Member

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    Exactly. Even if the owner has paid for it out of his own pocket it's definitely money which would be much better spent on his charity. Ridiculous. Domain is shite too.
     
  7. scottmccloud

    scottmccloud Well-Known Member

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    I don't get this at all. How did they end up paying $100,000? I don't know how big or how well known Autism Rocks is but surely nobody else is going to be able to use this domain name, which almost renders it worthless.
     
  8. Retired_Member42

    Retired_Member42 Retired Member

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    Just read a few articles on it. Sounds like both the buyer and seller are involved in Autism charities, perhaps it's some kind of donation from one organisation to another rather than an outright domain sale?
     
  9. Adam H

    Adam H Well-Known Member

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    Or an employee says to his boss "hey ill buy this crap domain and sell it to the charity for 100k, you convince the board its an awesome acquisition , ill give you half............win win. "
     
  10. ChrisMM United Kingdom

    ChrisMM Active Member

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    It appears the domain was purchased privately rather than through the charity, and that the seller said "it will help his family out greatly, and a big portion of it will go toward charity."

    Sounds a bit retarded to me.
     
  11. aZooZa

    aZooZa Well-Known Member

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    Very stupid indeed.
     
  12. Edwin

    Edwin Well-Known Member

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  13. ian

    ian Well-Known Member

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    Doesn't wash with me, especially if as it says, sedo/escrow charges applied!
     
  14. humble pie United Kingdom

    humble pie Banned

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  15. invincible

    invincible Well-Known Member

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    I attended a Brand Registry Group meeting at ICANN53 last week and one of the points I made was that these .brands gTLDs encourage brands to make use of subdomains more than many brands may have done in the past with their regular .co.uk or .com domain names. It's not possible to have dotless new gTLDs so "barclays" on its own won't resolve and nor will "barclays/{anything}".

    As expected, "homebarclays.com" was registered 19/05/2015 and I would anticipate any other subdomains under .barclays to attain similar treatment.

    In my opinion if dotless new gTLDs were possible, at least for http/web, brands could avoid using subdomains, which often have the affect of reading backwards, and keep their brand to the left most. Using brand/{anything} cannot be immitated in .com or any other gTLD but using {anything}.brand can. Personally I feel barclays/mortgages reads better than mortgages.barclays.

    When I posed the question of dotless and these new brand gTLDs reading backwards I felt the BRG representatives either didn't understand the points I was making or knew exactly what I meant but knew there was no answer to it so wanted to make me out to look a fool for bringing it up.
     
  16. Murray

    Murray Well-Known Member

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    I bet you didn't appreciate that
     
  17. invincible

    invincible Well-Known Member

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    ;-)


    (from iPhone)
     
  18. Edwin

    Edwin Well-Known Member

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    One of the problems with dotless comes from the disappearance of the address bar in many browsers. So allowing people to just type "barclays" to go to the .barclays main site breaks search completely and makes it impossible for any other business relating to or trading off the term to see any traffic.

    dotless is an issue that has been discussed at great length at ICANN in the past before they issued their ruling prohibiting such domains
    https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2013-08-30-en

    That may be one of the reasons why people didn't seem v. interested ie you were rehashing an issue that was put to bed several years ago...
     
    Last edited: Jul 1, 2015
  19. ian

    ian Well-Known Member

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    It just looks a complete mess, since when did anyone think that home.barclays (for example) is a smart move, looks horrible. We should just do away with www. in the same way as http:// is no longer displayed! With that approach though, shortening what is displayed, .com and .uk would be preferred over .co.uk
     
  20. Skinner

    Skinner Well-Known Member

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    Isn't http://barclays./ a qualified address, much like they did with http://to./ shortener back in the day, not quite dotless and a huge headache educating people to do brand DOT Slash.

    I wouldn't be surprised if google bring out "AdURLwords" where you can bid on words typed into the address bar, so type barclays, hit enter and it takes you to barclays site, creating dotless urls of sorts.
     
  21. mat

    mat Well-Known Member

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    The world is moving fast, including how companies use domain names and how people find and use sites. Like it or not we just have to deal with it.

    Putting any opinions aside about what is "right" you just have to adapt and get on with it.

    I am sure most of these massive companies and organisations would just laugh at the opinions of members of a domain name forum.
     
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