Domain name Bird.com is once again on the radar of the domain market analysts and investors. A year ago, the domain was almost sold at the Right of the Dot auction for $2.5 million. “Almost”, because the winner who had offered this sum of money for the domain, could not pay it in the end. He referred to the fact that the financial partners, who had guaranteed him support, refused to fulfill their obligations at the last moment.
The scandal got loud. The owner of the domain and the Right of the Dot company intended to sue the unfortunate buyer. But then the passions subsided: there was information that Right of the Dot, feeling its own responsibility, undertook to act as a broker and was able to sell Bird.com on very favorable terms. Neither the amount of the transaction nor information about the buyer appeared in the public access.
Now the story got a second wind. Some time ago, one of the observers noticed that the new registrant of the domain, whose data is hidden in the Whois record by privacy settings, is registered in the Netherlands. This suggested that the domain was purchased by the Dutch company MessageBird. It provides companies with a single cloud-based customer marketing communications platform with the ability to use voice chats, SMS, WhatsApp messages, etc. MessageBird is a leader in this young market with clients including Facebook (Meta), Uber, and Airbnb and has already raised over $1 billion in investments.
Obviously, the company with such financial resources is able to afford the most expensive domain purchases. And the further sequence of events looks surprising yet. Last week, Tech.eu, citing its sources, confirmed that the Bird.com domain was purchased by MessageBird. The transaction amount exceeded $10 million. Domain investor and blogger Elliot Silver, author and publisher of Domain Investing, reached out to Monte Cahn, CEO of Right of the Dot, who, as it was already mentioned, accompanied the transaction, to ask him if he could comment about the quote regarding the sale price in the Tech.eu article. “Unfortunately, I cannot talk about the price, however, it would be one of the biggest sales of last year and of all time,” said Mr. Cahn, CEO of Right of the Dot. It remains to add that the largest transaction of the last year was the purchase of the Hippo.com domain for $3,300,000 according to the DN Journal resource. However, the resource publishes only information about transactions from public access. And Mr. Cahn is probably aware of the purchases, which were not got public.
