Monsanto buys domain name for a fresh brand (and other end user purchases)

Monsanto buys a fresh brand name .com and a handful of fresh TLDs are snapped up by end users.

Monsanto recently applied for a trademark on Trecepta, and this past week it bought the matching .com domain name for just $850. Even more peculiar, the domain name was registered last month. Did someone spot the trademark application and register the domain name? Was there some sort of threat that limited the purchase price to $850?

The Monsanto purchase was just one of many end user sales at Sedo, which turned in an unusually high $2.2 million sales number. Its volume was similar to previous week’s, so there are likely one or two big undisclosed sales this stretch. A number of fresh TLDs, counting .bike, .lighting, .guru and .club, made the list.

Here are some of the end user domain name sales I identified:

(You can view previous lists like this here. If you’d like to learn how to sell your domain names like these on Sedo, download this note.)

SriLankaHolidays.co.uk £2,000 – Sri Lanka Holidays (Pvt) Ltd in Sri Lanka owns a number of similar domain names. It’s a tours firm.

Snack.club $1,500 – MunchPak, a subscription snack delivery service. Frankly, I think they’d do well to rebrand as Snack.Club.

X.lighting $3,999 – Lighting designer Next, which has a stylized X in its logo. It forwards the domain to next.de.

Drinks.ch €1,999- Swiss liquor firm Silvergogen AG.

AmberAlert.info €1,000 – Netpresenter, which provides services for mass notification and alerting. Amber Alerts are for abducted children.

EcoWrite.com $1,850 – office products firm Intek America bought this domain name to forward to EcoWritePens.com.

LJCG.com $1,200 – La Jolla Capital Group, a commercial property financing firm in San Diego. It uses the longer domain name ljcapitalgroup.com

StreetEat.com $2,250 – as best I can tell, StreetEat SRL provides apps for food truck operators to gain exposure. A cool idea.

MarvyUchida.com $799 – Thomson Brandy, Thomson Reuters’ brand protection arm. This purchase was for crafts firm Marvy Uchida, which uses the domain name Uchida.com.

InforNext.com $2,500 – Business process software firm Infor.

eMark.com $17,500 – Marketing firm eMark, which uses the domain name e-mark.nl.

OnApply.de €1,200 – Online recruitment firm On Apply, which uses the matching .de domain name.

Trecepta.com $850 – Monsanto bought this domain name for a fresh product it is launching, or perhaps as part of a name change for the firm (although the trademark is fairly limited in field of use.)

Service.bike €5,000 – Canyon Bicycles GmbH, which uses Canyon.com. It recently paid $1,500 for Canyon.club, showing that it’s warming to fresh top level domains.

Auto-Quotes.com €899 – CarWeek, which provides online marketing and website services to car dealers.

Proofreading.guru $988 – Mentorium GmbH, which provides tools for proofreading.