Looking at whois records for other cctlds on the heels of the .mx purchase, it looks like ABC.cm changed hands on 8/7. The domain looked to have been owned by a Chinese registrant.
Of course .cm has been in the news before, Kevin Ham was once profiled in a Business 2.0 article that is published on CNN. Maybe Disney will care about this name if Google is indeed the buyer. The domain was dropped and registered in 2014 so a quick flip.
From the article:
And what few people know is that he’s also the man behind the domain world’s latest scheme: profiting from traffic generated by the millions of people who mistakenly type “.cm” instead of “.com” at the end of a domain name.
Try it with almost any name you can think of — Beer.cm, Newyorktimes.cm, even Anyname.cm — and you’ll land on a page called Agoga.com, a site filled with ads served up by Yahoo (Charts, Fortune 500).
Ham makes money every time someone clicks on an ad — as does his partner in this venture, the West African country of Cameroon. Why Cameroon? It has the unforeseen good fortune of owning .cm as its country code — just as Germany runs all names that end with .de.
The difference is that hardly any .cm names are registered, and the letters are just one keyboard slip away from .com, the mother lode of all domains. Ham landed connections to the Cameroon government and flew in his people to reroute the traffic. And if he gets his way, Colombia (.co), Oman (.om), Niger (.ne), and Ethiopia (.et) will be his as well.
“It’s in the works,” Ham says over lunch in his hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia. “That’s why I can’t talk about it.” He’s nearly as reluctant to share details about his newest company, called Reinvent Technology, into which he’s investing tens of millions of dollars to build a powerhouse of Internet businesses around his most valuable properties.
Surmise the buyer is:
1) ABC/Disney, 2)Google, 3)Person or Entity hoping to flip
My guess is ABC/Disney
I don’t think Google really cares about losing traffic to its Holding Company. Google – yes. Nor do I think Google wishes to create an “Alphabet” or “ABC” brand.
If Google has filed for ABC or Alphabet trademark on the USPTO, I could be wrong. But I don’t see the point – all the holding companies, Nest, Google Glass, Loon, Calico, yes — as these will eventually move over to Google once profitable or get spun out as separate entiies
the updated Whois from today tells me it was Disney who purchased ABC.cm
makes more sense anyway as a mistype for ABC.com than Google..
yeah, but who-the-fuck even visits abc.com??? stupid
How so the Whois has not updated according to DomainTools since August 7
Domain Name: abc.cm
Domain ID: 383658-RegCM
WHOIS Server: whois.netcom.cm
Updated Date: 2015-08-07T22:25:20.344Z
Creation Date: 2014-04-22T22:59:49.913Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2017-04-22T22:59:50.198Z
Sponsoring Registrar: MarkMonitor Inc.
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited
Domain Status: clientDeleteProhibited
Domain Status: ok
Domain Status: clientUpdateProhibited
Registrant Name: DNStination Inc.
Registrant Organization: DNStination Inc.
Registrant Street: 425 Market St
Registrant Street: 5th Floor
Registrant City: San Francisco
Registrant State/Province: CA
Registrant Postal Code: 94105
Registrant Country: US
Registrant Phone: +1.4155319335
Registrant Phone Ext:
Registrant Fax: +1.4155319336
Registrant Fax Ext:
Registrant Email: admin@dnstinations.com
Disney uses CSC not Mark Monitor for example ESPN.com
Email domreg@espn.com is associated with ~1,230 domains
domainabuse@cscglobal.com is associated with ~364,006 domains
Registrant Org ESPN, Inc. is associated with ~1,310 other domains
Registrar CSC CORPORATE DOMAINS, INC.