Dallas Cowboys Give up Play for Cowboys.com - Backing Out of the Deal
(Page 3 of 4 )
The Dallas Cowboys are not a poor team. They're in the process of building an $800 million stadium. They could afford the $275,000 for the domain name; observers commenting on the deal pointed out that they pay rookie players more than that as a yearly salary. Monte Cahn, head of Moniker.com, the company handling the auction, said he almost fell out of his chair when he saw what happened next. The team wanted to return the domain.
"When I spoke to their attorney...he was dead serious, had no idea that it was $275k and was shocked when he received the purchase agreement (he thought he bought it for $275.00 - that's right two hundred and seventy five dollars!). I almost asked him what he was smoking," Cahn said in a thread covering the news.
To be fair, many people who don't know about the business of buying and selling domain names figure that several hundred dollars is quite expensive for such a commodity. And that's true when you consider a brand-new domain name can be purchased for as little as $6. But how could an intelligent person like an attorney be unaware of the cost of admission to the conference, not see the description of the auction on the conference's own web site, and somehow forget to look at the pre-published initial bidding range for the domain name in which his client is interested? It almost sounds as if the bidder didn't bother to get on the Internet to do his research - which is rather ironic, considering the commodity he was bidding on.
With the Dallas Cowboys letting go of the deal at the last minute, Monte Cahn and the owner of the domain, Murray Thibodeaux, found themselves in an unfortunate position. Fortunately, this part of the story has a happy ending. Cahn put Cowboys.com up for bid in the silent auction that was being conducted at the same time. The name sold - for $370,000. That's $95,000 more than the Dallas Cowboys theoretically paid for it, and many think the bidding went so high because the football team showed interest. Cowboys.com went for more than any other name in the silent auction. The most expensive domain in the entire auction was computer.com, which went for $2.2 million. The least expensive domain in the live auction went for $750 (three domains tied at that price), while a number of domains in the silent auction went as low as $300.
So who bought Cowboys.com? Eric Rice, who owns a bulk domain registrar named Domainsformedia.com. Is Rice a fan of a rival football team? Not hardly. "No ulterior motive," he explained when asked about why he grabbed the domain. "I have been looking at a very similar domain with a great country and western site that makes good money. My offers on that never panned out, so I saw this one as the way to go. I don't even watch football or much sports."
Next: Fumble or Touchdown? >>
More Web Hosting News Articles
More By Terri Wells
/ 5 
