According to whois records, MarkMonitor’s parent company, Thomson Reuters has acquired the premium two letter domain name TR.com from Wolters Kluwer US.
Wolters Kluwer has owned TR.com since August 2005 and was using the domain name for Telecommunications Reports under the business name CCH Incorporated.
Thomson Reuters Corporation is a major multinational mass media and information firm founded in Toronto and based in New York City and Toronto according to Wikipedia. Thomson Reuters is a publicly traded company on the NYSE under the ticker symbol TRI, with a market cap of $29.8B.
2 letter .com domain names have always been valuable assets and many are owned by large corporations. Coca Cola owns and uses KO.com, Procter & Gamble owns and uses PG.com, as does Facebook who uses FB.com as a redirect and email and reportedly paid $8.5 Million for it.
PX.com recently sold for more than $1M as reported yesterday by DomainInvesting.com. Add in the heavy interest in the 2 letter .com market from Chinese investors and the prices keep climbing for the 676 total domains in the category.
Since this transfer of the domain name only took place on August 26, 2015 according to whois records, Thomson Reuters is currently only redirecting the domain name to http://thomsonreuters.com/en.html . Only time will tell if ThomsonReuters.com will become simply TR.com.
Thomson Reuters acquired domain name brand protection registrar MarkMonitor in 2012.
There were several speculative reports that Thomson Reuters were to merge in the 2011/2012 time frame with the past owners of TR.com, Wolters Kluwer but I wasn’t able to confirm that actually took place. It does appear though that the two companies have worked together, so the transfer of ownership of TR.com does appear to be a sale and not an internal move that I can tell.
Here is a screenshot of the current whois record showing Thomson Reuters as the owners of TR.com now.
Mike says
> “…the prices keep climbing for the 676 total domains in the category”
There is actually less than 676 LL.com names registered, because some had dropped and are blocked by the registry for future registrations.
Jamie Zoch says
@Mike,
CM.com was held by the registry but brought back active via legal in January 2016… what are the other ones held by the registry? I’d have to do a scan, but in general, I wasn’t aware of more that are held by the registry?
Ian Ingram says
I’m not aware of any either. Tracy Fogarty put together a really nice list of all 676 two letter .coms & who they are being used by. There are two that don’t have a user listed: au.com appears to be owned by KDDI Corporation (not resolving) and ya.com owned by France Telecom (redirects to a 404 page at error.orange.es)
http://enaming.com/inventory/two-letter-domains/
Desus Nirist says
TR.com is such a great domain to have, two letter domains are extremely powerful.
elevator says
Nice information all together. Thanks.