I have two domains that have the same name as two different multi-million dollar corporations. I registered them several about 4 years ago. Now are these worth anything at all? I haven’t been contacted by either company and I haven’t contacted them.
Are these worth even owning, aren’t they technically a liability? Should I just give it to them out of the blue or simply wait until they expire, or is there any possible way to sell them?
You could try selling them, someone might be interested in buying them.
I certainly wouldn’t let them drop, at worse you’ll get a letter demanding you turn them over to the corporations and you can do so then if you choose to.
Reg fee is small enough to hold onto them.
Go through a domain name broker.
The risk is that trying to sell a name that’s trademarked will land you in court, and they’ll take them away from you in exchange for a few grand in legal fees.
is their potential worth simply in the branding or do they get type in traffic?
It’s the branding, and it’s their actual company name, they basically used their company name in their URL and then added to it, so i have their name registered as a domain which is also shorter than what they currently have.
ahh, well i think you could try to contact them and negotiate a decent price for it. I wouldn’t try to be overly greedy. I would also do a bit more research and plan out well how you will present the domain name opportunity to them.
Take facebook for example. They started out as thefacebook.com and when they grew enough, purchased the shorter domain name.
As soon as you approach them you open yourself up to losing the site to a dispute.
True, I think it’s called cybersquatting or something. Well I guess I’m just stuck with this domain and I guess I’ll just wait until it expires. Too bad this isn’t like back in the late 90’s where something like this would be worth big money.
no point in letting it expire, i’m sure you can work out some thing with the company. They’re not going to go in to legal matters if it can be settled for less than what that would cost. plus, they havn’t yet, so you may be able to get a bit of money out of it now.
I’m pretty sure they would just try and take it forcefully through legal matters. Many companies have done this. Not sure why they haven’t yet, maybe they just didn’t notice it or when they go to the domain and realize nothing is there and don’t care.
I can’t use the domain because it’s certainly too unique, and it’s pretty obvious I registered it because I thought it would be worth something. I should have sold it before they created those cybersquatting laws and whatnot. But yeah any real ideas on how to turn a profit from this?
If this doesn’t make at least a few hundred dollars it’s not going to be worth my time.
if its that valuable, setup a creative set of pages with content relating to the words in the domain and not having anything to do with the company. You could get extra type in traffic with the power of the domain.
companies and other people can’t get away with trademarking general words. Like i know that sex.com is trademarked, or at least that is what i heard. …
but if a case was taken the distance, there is know way the person owning this domain would be handed a pass to own whatever sex.tld that came out, you simply can’t own general vocabulary.
cocacola or walmart is a different scenario.
anyways, i don’t know what you’re domain name is so i don’t have any idea if it could be used to setup a different site.
At least set up some advertising on the page. Make money and you can measure the traffic. Might not be worth selling yet.
Meh I would but I don’t know the legalities and it’d probably cost me more to ask my lawyers. Plus their alexa ranking is not so great. I thought it’d be pretty funny to turn it into an adult site but then again it wouldn’t be funny enough to get sued over lol. It’s a enormous construction company that builds enormous projects and also has a large investment side.
Did you register them before, or after, the other companies used the names ?
This would have some bearing on the value.
You would be surprised what some companies would pay for a domain name… I was when I got an out of the blue offer for one of mine.
Do not just let it expire. If they are interested in the name, it would cost them $500+ in their legal experts time just to contact you in the first place.
That makes it worth $500 to begin with.
How much it would be worth to a competitor of theirs though ?? There is a thought…
Another idea…
Set up the index page with wording saying this is NOT xyz company, but their website is at… url
They could not complain about that.
You could then add some advertising to the page, and see how it goes to cover its own costs.
Hmm yeah you have some good ideas here. These big companies work together on some projects so it’ll be tough but it might be worth a shot. If I take this route and it turns up successful I’ll contact you to Paypal some of the money I make off it for the good idea.
I don’t think I’ll take the advertising route though, I really don’t see it generating enough revenue to be worth my time, there traffic is relatively low and moreso for rich clients. I prefer not to get in a legal bind over something silly.
If this domain is potentially worth some real money go after selling it. Figure out some legal stuff. You’d be stupid to just let it expire as this could be the easiest money opportunity you’ll ever have.
Don’t look back and wander “what if” later. Think about the best way to go about it and give it a shot. Get the most you can respectfully.
you obviously owned the domain before they became the company or they’d have it. See what you can do and Make Sure you report back to this thread With the meat and potatoes of how it went! 
It’s not that easy to flip domains with some of the new laws some years ago. They’ve been in business longer than their domain has been around, however I knew of the company and I knew they didn’t have a site for whatever reason, so I quickly registered it because back then it was legal to buy any domain and sell to companies pretty much no matter what your intentions were.
I was planning to sell it to them a year later but after a year, being so busy I simply forgot all about it. I originally asked here because I figure people flip domains all the time and might have a few good ideas or know some loopholes. I’ll certainly report back if I was able to sell it to anyone, I’m particularly looking into their competitors right now to see which ones they don’t do business with but are competing with them.