Marchex Archives – We're Fusible

EA put up $80K to buy Battlefield domain, owns all the way up to Battlefield9.com

Earlier this month Marchex announced it would be splitting into two companies, with Marchex becoming a pure play mobile advertising company and Archeo focusing on a premium domain and advertising marketplace.

With the news came the announcement of the company’s top 500 domain sales (PDF), one of which included the sale of Battlefield.com to Electronic Arts for $80,000 USD.

A number of bloggers and tech journalists wrote about the news, with blogs like Domain Name Wire digging into the historical sales to learn which companies plunked down cash to acquire names. As Andrew Allemann points out, several paid top dollar. Glam Network dropped $90,000 for foodie.com, while Google shelled out $100,000 for Chromium.org and $40,000 for HotPot.com.

Electronic Arts has invested a lot of money into its Battlefield franchise and its domain report card shows it has succeeded in the online arena.

In June 2011, EA acquired Battlefield.net for an undisclosed amount of cash.

The company also owns other matching names in the video game series like battlefield2.com (WHOIS), battlefield3.com (WHOIS), battlefield1942.com (WHOIS), battlefield2142.com (WHOIS), battlefieldheroes.com (WHOIS), and battlefield1943.com (WHOIS).

It’s already been reported that the franchise isn’t ending at Battlefield 3 with talk of Battlefield 4 already swirling around the internet.

Perhaps though, Battlefield will see new releases to rival Activision’s Modern Warfare for years to come.

EA currently owns names all the way up to Battlefield9.com according to WHOIS records.

That’s right, Electronic Arts owns battlefield4.com (WHOIS), battlefield5.com (WHOIS), battlefield6.com (WHOIS), battlefield7.com (WHOIS) and even battlefield8.com (WHOIS).

While one might say owning all these names may be nothing more than EA protecting its intellectual property, one could also speculate that EA has long term plans going far beyond Battlefield 4.

Talking about this story: MP1st and Gameranx

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton around the world. In the entrepreneurial world of domain names, the buzz though has been mostly over internet web addresses.

After all the news and publicity, it now appears the domain name theroyalwedding.com has been sold as the registrant contact information now displays Domain Transfer Escrow Service by Sedo according to DomainTools.

For years, the URL was owned by a KBlacklock, until November 17, 2010 when the name switched hands and went under Whois privacy, a day after the engagement was officially announced.

Though the seller and price are not officially known, the current website is hosted on the Most Wanted Domains nameservers of domain expert Mike Berkens, who also happened to write about royal wedding domains recently on his blog The Domains.

Domain Buzz

It’s estimated that more than 2 billion people around the world watched the wedding, so you can very well imagine the interest on the web.

According to eWeek: “Facebook says more than 6.8 million people publicly commented on the wedding within the first 12 hours of the event. That number passed the 10 million mark by the end of the day. Livestream, which partnered with The Associated Press, UK Press Association, CBS and Entertainment Tonight for its live stream, said it surpassed its own record with, at one point, more than 300,000 concurrent live streams. Yahoo said it experienced its largest traffic for a live video event, outperforming its audience for Michael Jackson’s July 2009 funeral by a whopping 21 percent, the AP said.”

In mid-April the editor of the domain blog DomainGang, discussed how Marchex, the owners of royalwedding.com had put the name to waste. The story apparently prompted the call advertising and small business marketing company which owns over 200,000 domains, to upgrade the landing page for the domain name from a less-than-royal parked page to a more improved parked page complete with an image of the couple.

The Edmonton Journal ran a story about katemiddleton.com called: What’s in a Domain name? Katemiddleton.com about fun, not money. The story discusses how Greg Kureluk and his wife Carole Lemire, and a group of local business partners bought the rights to the domain name, www. katemiddleton.com for a little more than $2,000.

Mike Berkens, in his post about royal family domain names, pointed out that in late April on the aftermarket site Namejet, a typo of Royal Family royallfamily.com sold for $1,877.