Google Inc. continues it’s onslaught of buying and registering domain names relating to its announcement on August 10, 2015 of it’s new holding company, Alphabet Inc.
So much talk has been behind the ABC.xyz domain acquisition, yet Alphabet Inc. has been on a domain buying spree every since buying many other domain names related to “ABC” and “Alphabet”.
I’m not sure how much Google has spent on acquiring all the versions of “ABC” or Alphabet” domains it has but it has to be a fairly large sum IMHO by now.
Lets try to get a generalized idea and use some data that may not be known by the majority of the general public.
Google has continued to use domain name brand protection service MarkMonitor to help in acquiring and registering relating domain names. Potentially upwards of a hundred + domain names have been purchased or registered by MarkMonitor/Google relating to ABC and Alphabet.
Keep in mind that not all domain names are “available” and are already owned by somebody, so this requires a sales agreement between two parties and a purchase price. This is going to cost the interested party a fair amount more than the annual cost to simply register an available domain name.
Here are some domain names that have been reportedly purchased/acquired by Google, not registered, from another entity and the reportedly price paid if known.
Purchased
- ABC.xyz Undisclosed, but to note, the the highest single reported New gTLD domain sale to date is Wine.club which sold for $140,000 at the Namescon RightoftheDot.com auction in January for $140,000
- Alphabet.xyz $3,800
- ABC.Global about $4,500
- ABC.Club Unknown
- ABC.mx $17,700
- ABC.cm Unknown
That doesn’t include the hundreds of domain names that were registered just under the .XYZ extension by third parties which Google will probably have to wind up filing a URS or UDRP on if they wish to secure any of those.
Many more domain purchases? Likely, very likely!
Just yesterday I had noticed that Alphabet.kr was acquired at Sedo and MarkMonitor is in whois records for that domain. Very likely Google is the buyer. Alphabet.kr sold for $1,100 usd at Sedo.
The latest domain name to be purchased by Google goes back to its roots and is a .com domain name with the purchase of a domain that was on a full developed website: ABCAlphabet.com which was discovered this morning!
That domain name has been registered since September 13, 2011 and was owned by Kamal Chandra of Sakai Japan. Whois records now show MarkMonitor and Google Inc. as the owners. The domain name does not resolve at time of publication.
The kids website that was on ABCAlphabet.com held over 200 indexed pages in Google and holds a global ranking on Alexa.com of 15,701,689 which would indicate only a small amount of traffic, but at least more than many domains/websites.
Cost of buying ABCAlphabet.com is currently unknown but I have reached out to the past owner to see if they can share, but I have not heard back yet at time of publication. (likely under a NDA though). Here is a screen shot of the website that was on the domain name, which now no longer resolves.
To note, Google does not own Alphabet.com, BMW does and they are not interested in selling it at this time. So, this research has not revealed an exact price that Google may have spent with buying and registering domain names related to the announcement of Alphabet Inc. but its clear that the costs are mounting and they are still buying relating domain names.
