A week ago we wrote about the domain name DrawSomething.com selling on Afternic for $3,000
As we noted the domain was under privacy at Godaddy and actually still is but the domain is now forwarding to the developer of the App omgpop.com.
Meaning that the developer of the App, which has been downloaded more than 35 Million times, bought the exact match .com from BuyDomains.com for $3k.
Yesterday Zynga bought OMGPOP for $210 Million dollars.
maybe, or the buyer is just forwarding it.
What can you say…like losing a winning lottery ticket.
This doesn’t add up.
The content on the site was far from official. OMGPOP wouldn’t run a little wordpress installation titled ‘Draw Something Helper’. It would direct the domain to the DrawSomething or OMGPOP website.
Maybe OMGPOP bought the domain from the auction winner?
What a missed opportunity that was.
It wasn’t an auction it was listed at afternic.com with a BIN price of $3K
Well I guess they were conserving cash, up until the point they didn’t need to.
Glad to hear, because if it was anyone other than OMGPOP or Zynga it would have trademark infringement/bad faith written all over it.
I would really like to here a legal opinion on M’s comment above about bad faith. The descriptive nature of the .Com in question would be very difficult to utilize in another way. Lets say the BuyPeanuts company goes viral this month and next month someone purchases buypeanuts.com, what other use would they have for the domain? Another example would be something like MusicMaker.com.
I look at the trademark that they have and M is right because it covers “providing an Internet website portal in the field of computer games and gaming”. I have also read UDRP decisions that say a registration date even if its 2000 doesnt matter if the domain changes hands, and in the back of my mind I am sure I have read that even renewing is an act of bad faith!
Love to get an opinion on this.
Their business model is what it is. It’s high overhead which requires a lot of buyer activity.
It’s not John Q Domainer who owns 10K generic .coms he registered in the 1990s, only dealing with people willing to pay a desperation price because his parking income is so ample and his overhead so low.
Own a quarter million names like “DrawSomething” and pass up $3K on them too many times, you go broke. A part of that model is accepting when a whale of an end user winds up with one for cheap.
The only area where they conceivably dropped the ball was by not being in tune to the market, but that’s hard to do when you own hundreds of thousands of domains and rely on a fixed price model to stay profitable.
I agree with “M”. Thge buyer should have forwarded it to a legitimate art supply affiliate until (ahem) an enduser approached them to buy it.
Interesting:
http://www.businessinsider.com/omgpops-founder-had-just-1700-in-his-bank-account-before-selling-the-hottest-app-in-the-world-to-zynga-2012-3