Product Domains are on fire right now, especially in the expiry market where one man’s garbage is turning out to be gold for many domain investors. Today I was involved in the expired auction for InfraredThermometer.com, a product domain with 4,400 local monthly searches, 9,900 global monthly searches, and a CPC of $3.29. It is always interesting to me when names like this drop and then sell for thousands of dollars, and the detective inside me just has to know a bit more about who dropped it.
Using Domain Tools, my trusty sidekick for pretty much every purchase decision I make, I took a look at the WHOIS History. The domain name was originally registered back in June of 1999 by a company called MotionNet in Vancouver, Washington. This company held-onto the domain, well, forever until dropping it this year. When you visit MotionNet.com it shows a website for a company called USDMedia, as you can see below:
This company is a division of US Digital, a company that makes optical encoders, inclinometers, and other motion control components.You can see their website below and a few of the products that they are selling. One product you might notice is missing from the line is…infrared thermometers.
So here’s what the detective inside me thinks might have happened here, and yes I’m a huge geek and do enjoy understanding how end-users and businesses think about domain names. I think that US Digital was ahead of their time, in 1999 they started registering domains for products they were thinking of making. As far as forward-thinking goes I think this is pretty impressive for a company to understand the value of a product domain back in 1999.
Then they never made an Infrared Thermometer and finally decided, 12 years later that it was time to stop paying the $8/year to renew the name. While $2,407 is probably chump change for them it still would have allowed them to recoup their initial investment plus make a few thousand bucks, however like many companies and end-users, they probably didn’t know our industry existed.
I thought this was a great example of how good domain names expire. I know there are a number of people that feel like everything that is dropping is another Domainers garbage, but in this case, and many others it is actually the garbage of an end-user or big company that didn’t know what to do with the domain. I’ll be following this as I am interested to see what the new owner will do with it…something tells me they’ll park it first and see what kind of traffic and revenue it gets, however you never know when another company could pick this up and use it to help build their own brand around a product like this.
Let me know if you like posts like this where I do a bit of detective work…I have fun doing it but am not sure if people like reading about this or not. Since I do this when I’m looking at expired domains anyways I thought, why not share it with all of you? That’s all for detective Morgan for now – let me know if you’d like to see more of this or if I should keep my detective work to myself 🙂
