Why do people still cybersquat ? That was a question posed a couple of weeks back on Namepros, and while I am not advocating it any way, I am going to give an example of how it still pays off in 2014.
PluralSight.in sold on Wednesday for $16,000. The domain was registered in July of 2013, by a gentleman in China who just listed himself as Jeff. No last name, just Jeff. Well just Jeff regged pluralsight.in which has several live trademarks, some before the name was registered and others registered after the domain registration.
The company Plural Sight was written up on Tech Crunch back in 2012 when it announced its first funding from the outside world. The company took in $27.5 million.
From the article:
Pluralsight, an online training resource targeting professional developers, is today announcing its first outside funding, courtesy of a $27.5 million investment from Insight Venture Partners. The additional capital will help Pluralsight fund the expansion of its course library and will be used for hiring.
Salt Lake City-based Pluralsight was founded back in 2004 by Aaron Skonnard (CEO), Fritz Onion (Editor in Chief), Keith Brown (CTO), and Bill Williams (who’s no longer there). The company got its start as a classroom training outfit that once involved sending out an instructor to a business or having employees attend a training event. Three years in, it shifted the business model from in-person training to online learning.
Read the full story here
The company has been active on the acquisition front as well, they purchased Digital Tutors for $45 million back in April.
So did being in China and just having the name Jeff help the .in registrant ? Perhaps the company figured it was simpler to purchase the name on a trusted exchange like Sedo, than to file a UDRP and have to deal with a registrant in another part of the world.
$16,000 is a significant amount of money for a handreg in the .in extension, only two .in extensions have sold for that much or better in 2013 or 2014 (Domains.in $40,000, Yum.in $16,000).
So while there is great risk in regging names like this and it is not recommended by anyone here, it sometimes pays off as the registrant gets what they were hoping for, the perfect buyer that has a lot of cash, who will just buy the domain.
There is one more to mention: topup.in sold in July 2013 for 15,000.00 USD via Sedo.
Last week, someone also registered pluralsig.ht 😉
Dumb decision by the company.
Once you pay $16k for one trademark-infringing domain in order to “simplify” things and avoid a UDRP, you encourage cybersquatters to jump all over other extensions. After all, if you’re on record paying a $16k ransom once, you may pay $16k again.
With all the new TLDs out there, any brand now has hundreds of children that can be kidnapped.
If squatting opportunities are so numerous (and many times they’re more confined), then a company really ought to either ignore all the cybersquatters or make an example of them.
These companies are doltish to begin with. Why would someone think that a set of alphabets, interwoven with domain addresses, redundant dots, slashes, dashes, and many W’s, have anything to do with their brand? These scatterbrained, and avaricious dolts have managed to pilfer names, and numbers designated as a protocol for the public internet – which has nothing to do with their acquisitive, covetous, grasping, materialistic, mercenary, possessive brands. But they will discover that it’s a big Universe out there. Let them protect their brands in all those extensions, and then ICANN will release hundreds more.