I haven’t heard anything from or about Internet REIT in a while, but I received an email this afternoon from Lisa Box who is Vice President of Sales for iREIT. Lisa wrote to let me know about the launch of DomainMarketplace.com, a website that has iREIT-owned domain names for sale:

I hope this email finds you well.  I wanted to let you know we have recently launched www.domainmarketplace.com! Here you can search the iREIT inventory and buy directly from the site.  We are still testing…”

If you don’t know about Internet REIT, you can learn more about the company on its LinkedIn page. They received funding from Maveron, were a big buyer of domain names a couple of years ago (I see several names I previously owned in this new website), ran into trademark issues, and their domain names receive millions of visitors each month.

DomainMarketplace.com has domain names priced from as low as the $50 range all the way up to 7 figures for OfficeSupply.com and Netster.com. It looks like they would also consider offers on their domain names as well.

I don’t get it. I was reading another article on TechCrunch yesterday about a startup company whose brand name is different than the domain name that is being used by the company. I understand that many “cool” domain names aren’t available in the .com, but in my opinion, the company should use another domain name that matches their brand, even if that means coming up with a unique name.

Take the payment company known as Square for example. Square.com has been registered for many years, so they had to use SquareUp.com.  Why not just brand themselves as Square Up instead of causing consumer confusion. Should the company grow extensively, they can afford to spend the money to buy Square.com and then rebrand as Square. This way, there’s no confusion and they’ll control both domain names. Sure, customers who go to Square.com will realize they’re in the wrong place, but why would any company want to take a chance that they would lose a customer.

Yesterday I read about a startup called Lookout, and I visited Lookout.com to check them out. As you can probably tell by the title of the article, they aren’t using Lookout.com, which was registered many years ago. Instead, they are using MyLookout.com, which isn’t a bad domain name. I would think they could match it up and use My Lookout as their brand.

Assuming 15-30% of a start-up’s traffic is type-in traffic, it doesn’t make sense to add confusion to the market while increasing the value of the other .com that is parked and will earn more ppc revenue. As a result of this, the domain owner would be less likely to negotiate to sell the domain name, fearing that the company would try to entrap them by negotiating. Further, there is little reason to sell a domain name whose traffic and revenue consistently grows.

Many people will argue that the domain name isn’t as important as the product or service being offered, and I agree wholeheartedly. However, I think it’s silly to be known as one name but have a different domain name. Square and Lookout are just two of many start-up examples.

Rob Monster is one of the most approachable people in the domain space, and I think his company has a good business model that may work for some domain investors. Epik just launched BumperProtectors.com this morning for my company, and as I promised, I will keep you apprised of the results in a future post.

For now though, I would like to remind you that Rob will be taking part in a free webcast this afternoon at 2pm EST (approximately 2 hours from now). The purpose is to learn more about Epik and Rob, and to learn how their services may be able to help you develop your domain names, as I did with BumperProtectors.com.

You need to sign up prior to the webcast to participate, so you might want to do that ASAP. I am sure this webcast will be available at a later point if you can’t make it or have other things going on, but you’ll want to check it out, especially if you’ve never connected with Rob before.