Reply All - #7 This Website Is For Sale

Episode Date: December 29, 2014

This week we enter the mysterious, Byzantine underworld of domain sales, where people make money speculating on the website naming market. A few years ago, the owners of the popular journalism website longform.org blundered into this world when they innocently tried to procure longform.com. In this episode, we find out about their misadventures, and we hear from the Derek Jeter of URL purchases. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There are millions of websites out there. Doctors.com and Dads.com are just two examples that seem like they'd be exactly what you'd think they'd be. But instead, they're blank or filled with spammy links. It's like seeing a vacant storefront in Times Square. Who are the people who own these domains? And how do they end up vacant in the first place? I know now because I went on an odyssey into the smoky backrooms of the internet,

where domains are bought, sold, auctioned, and held hostage. and where fortunes are made. From Gimlet, this is Reply All, a show about the internet. I'm Alex Goldman. My introduction to this world began a few weeks ago with a guy named Max Linsky. He, along with his co-founder, Aaron Lamer, runs a website that collects the best nonfiction on the web.

It's called longform.org. Dot org. And for ages, they've had their eyes set on another website, longform.com. As long as they've been running.org, dot com has sat unused, with a note at the top that said something like, click here to make an offer on this domain.

And so, Max Linsky would periodically make an offer on this domain. I would email this guy, but from fake Gmail accounts, and ask what the price was. Because I didn't want him to know that it was me, one of the longform.org people emailing him. So when you sent him an email, you just create a fake Gmail account. You'd just be like, interested consumer at gmail.com. Yeah, straight up fake names. And he would respond sometimes, but usually he would not. Okay.

And he wanted 30 grand. That was the asking price. which was not a, we didn't have a $30,000 URL budget. And it went on like this. Every month or so, fake email, how much? No answer or $30,000. For years. This continued until Max's partner Aaron stepped in, or more accurately, blundered in.

In April, Aaron sent an email to the owner of longform.com, but he didn't make up a fake email address. He used his real one, his longform.org email address. Which was considered a fuck up at the time. I assume it still is considered. Yeah, I don't think the verdict on that has changed. Yeah, so I think I did know in the back of my mind that Max maybe had already done it. I was kind of like hoping that I would do something that would be considered very productive, but not having done a bunch of work, you know, like that if he just wrote back and was like,

oh, yeah, sure, just, you know, throw me 500 bucks, then I would have, I would have like a big coup to report. So he gets the same thing, 30 grand. And it's like, that's too much. Right. Then, the next day, we get an email from someone totally new, offering to buy longform.org for $500. What? For years, we have been not emailing this guy from our email addresses. Then we finally do, and the next day we get a crazy lowball offer for longform.org.

That crazy lowball offer came from a guy who claimed his name was Cameron Gordon. But Max and Aaron thought that that was probably a pseudonym. In fact, they were pretty sure that the lowball offer was a trick and that the person behind it was the men who owned Longform.com, Michael Birkins' Esquire. Michael Birkins' Esquire is a prominent player in the domain name reselling industry. Michael Birkins spends a lot of time thinking about how to make money on domain names. He's known as a wily negotiator.

In October, he sold the website rookiepoker.com for $20,000 after buying it for just $500. And when he's not buying and selling domains, he's editing his domain industry news website, thedomains.com. Look how many times Michael Birkins has posted today. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, eight times. Eight times on domain industry news. Michael Burkins owns Longform.com, the website Max and Aaron wanted to buy.

And immediately after Max and Aaron received a lowball offer for Longform. They heard from Michael Birkins himself saying, Hey guys, I just got an email from someone named Cameron Gordon wanting to buy longform.com. He wanted to see if they wanted to bid on longform.com before it sold. The timing seemed very suspicious. It seemed more likely to me that this was someone that Michael Burkins was friendly with, was in business with, you know, and that when they had a fish on the line, this is how they worked up the price, right? Michael Bergen says, all right, the longform.org guys finally emailed us.

So let's see what we can get out of them. They thought they were being worked over, but they still did want longform.com. So they put in a bid. Michael Berkin's claim to the offer he'd just gotten was for $7,500. We said, okay, if they're offering $7,500, we'll offer $7,500. Okay, so he says, no, you have to offer more than $7,500. You have to top their offer. So he said, okay, $8,000.

That's more. He goes back to them. Then he says the offer is 10. So now we're in a bidding war. To Max and Aaron, this was both annoying and legitimately scary. Annoying because it's annoying to feel like you're being scammed. But scary because what if it wasn't a scam? And Longform.com fell into the wrong hands.

Just try and imagine your doomsday scenario. And what is it? This is not a rational fear. We deal heavily in irrational fears. The most irrational fear was that someone was going to build something super similar to what we do that was shitty. And if that was on longform.com, it would be confusing. People would assume that was us. So you assumed that they were faking, but like you had this nagging doubt in your stomach. Like, what if this is real and these people are just going to make a nightmare for us once this domain is sold?

Exactly. Yeah. The great odds are with this being theater. But on the off chance it's not, it would make this thing that we've worked very. hard on look terrible. The bidding continued. The price climbed toward $25,000. Finally, Max and Aaron said, enough. We're not paying for this. They were given a day to reconsider,

and then Berkin said it would sell to another buyer. So we were waiting for this moment, waiting for this big moment where the flip was going to get switched and was going to be revealed who this mystery buyer was and how we were going to get screwed. And at midnight, it just went back to the old site. Nothing happened. Nothing happened.

So Max and Aaron assumed that it had been a scam, that there was no other buyer, that the whole thing had been invented by Michael Birkins to try and bid up the price. At least, that was their assumption until they came to our studios to do the interview. Do you mind if we look at it right now? Yeah, that's fine. I actually looked at it today, and it's different. Every website has something called a who is record. It's basically a way for the public to find out who owns a particular site. They're often inaccurate or hidden, but a who is can at least show you when a website's owner's. ownership has changed. And when we looked at the who is record for longform.com, well, it's changed. It has sold. The story I came in here to tell you has a different ending. This is amazing.

It's terrifying. That's right. It wasn't a con. Longform.com actually sold on May 4th, days after their contact with Berkins took place. Stay with us. We're going to go further down the rabbit hole after a word from our sponsor. After finding out the shocking news that longform.com had in fact been sold, we set about trying to find to whom. And we found the domain listed for sale on a website called Afternick for a $10,000 minimum bid alongside a bunch of other domains that were, for whatever reason, much cheaper. So when you look at those domains that are available in that list, and Longform is listed as a minimum $10,000 bid, and then you have, say, ABC form, which I would say objectively is about as good a domain. that's a $500 minimum. So you get the feeling that we've somehow been entered into the system as bigger fish.

I'm not going to call us big fish. I'll say small, medium fish. Well, I think your metaphor here is important because I think the real question here is, are we the fish or are we the bait? I think we're the fish. Like, I think that we sent some sort of a signal up the chain that some guys who've got a wallet are, interested in this domain and that somehow percolated all throughout this, this seller's market. So we're all journalists. How the hell are we going to figure this out? I mean, I wonder if we could get like an anonymous, like, I was a domain reseller and I'm now a reformed kind of guy to explain

like how these businesses actually operate. Of course, all of those people have been thrown off boats in the Florida Keys now. Yeah, everybody's dead. I think that what we should do is go to that page where it's for sale for $10,000 minimum bid and call 339-22-2-2-5134. All right. Sounds good. Let's do it. Thank you for calling after Nick, the world's largest premium domain marketplace. If you know your party's extension, press one now.

To speak with a sales consultant, press two. I, of course, went into this phone call the way I do every cold call I record, expecting someone who'd be taciturn, annoyed at being recorded, and unwilling to help us understand just what we were fumbling into. But I didn't count on Dave Higgins. After Nick, Dave Higgins speaking. Hi, my name's Alex Goldman. I am a radio show host. I just want to let you know beforehand. I am recording this phone call. Is this on the radio now, Alex? No, no, no. We're not live. This is pre-recorded, so don't worry about that. All right. I am interested in just trying to figure out the who owns a particular website that

I have a potential interest in, and I'm wondering if you can help me out with that. I can. After Nick H.R., if you're listening to this, please give Dave Higgins a raise. This was by far the best over-the-phone customer service experience I've ever had. Not only did he stay on the phone with us for a half an hour, he essentially became our domain spirit guide, teaching us the ins and outs of the domain resale universe, starting with what his company, After Nick, does. We're a domain named brokers.

So my company here, we broker approximately 7 million domains that are owned by different parties, and we broker them on their behalf. I assume they get a percentage of it and you get a percentage of it as well. Yep, we're the middleman. One of the things that Dave told us was that his company, Afternick, did not own Longform.com and was not trying to sell it. The fact that we'd found Longform.com listed on the Afternick website, he said was just a weird random mistake.

But we liked talking to Dave. So we kept him on the phone and asked him what we should do, to get to the bottom of the mystery of longform.com. And Aaron started at the very beginning. All right. Well, I have some bad news about something I did in my past, which is at one point, it was late. I was feeling acquisition-e.

And I sent an email to the old owner from Aaron at Longform. Do you think that has, do you think that hurt my chances or drove the price up that I let the cat that I know that you would keep in the bag out? Don't sugarcoat this, Dave. Yeah. Well, possibly. A new Google Longform, which is essentially the first thing anybody would do when pricing a domain. Looking at it, as a domain investor myself, I would suspect that they wouldn't, excuse the expression, jack the price by looking at your website, which is a good thing. Why would you think they wouldn't jack the price?

Because it's not, from what I can see, it's not a household. name where they see dollar signs, right? And nothing against you, gentlemen. I'm not too familiar with the organization. I like to until right now, Dave. You hear that? Dave, our long form domain spirit guide, he doesn't even have faith in its value. Okay, so if it's not all that valuable, why did it get bid up to $25,000 back in the email negotiation with Michael Berkins Esquire? And in the end, was it actually sold for $25,000? Dave couldn't tell us the answer to those questions. But he did tell us who Longform.com was sold to, a company called Mark Monitor, which does something called brand protection.

I went to Mark Monitor to ask them for an interview, and their communications department told me that what the company does essentially is manage portfolios of domains for huge corporations. So if I'm Procter & Gamble and I have a new product called Fresh Clean, Mark Monitor will go out and find 20 domain names for Fresh Clean's new website. If FreshClean.com is unavailable, Mark Monitor will help them procure Fresh Clean. brand.com or buy freshclean.com from whoever owns it. And then once the corporation has that domain, Mark Monitor will protect the brand by, quote, elimination of confusing and potentially fraudulent use of your brand online. Mark Monitor's spokesperson was very clear that they wouldn't tell us who bought longform.com or for how much. She was basically the anti-Dave. So, there was really only one person left to turn to, the man himself, Michael Birkins' Esquire. His phone line was pretty bad,

So I might have to break in and translate sometimes. Berkins is self-employed, works out of an office at his home, and he says that big domain resellers like Afternick are not the entire market by a long shot. It's made up of full-time investors like him, hobbyists, dabblers, corporations, a whole thrumming ecosystem of domain investors, trying to pair the perfect domain with the perfect client. And how's it going for him? We sell seven figures of domain names every year.

With your business specifically, I mean, you're moving over a million domains a year, if we're talking seven figures. Not a million domains, no. No, no. I mean, in dollars. Oh, millions in dollars. Okay, okay, okay. So how many domains would you say you buy and sell in a year?

A few hundred. The man makes over a million dollars a year buying and selling a couple hundred domains. He told me he's lucky to have found his calling. He compared himself to another natural who'd found his calling, Derek Jeter. Yeah, for whatever reason, if he's led him in a different direction,

and he came a salesman, he may have been a terrible salesman. you know, or maybe a terrible lawyer, but, you know, he became what he became. So I think in domains, there's no different than anything else. I think there's people who have, you know, a vision to see it, and he goes through a list of 100,000 domain meetings that are dropping every day and spot 20 or 31s that are worth something. I think that's the talent.

As for how he chooses the domains he procures, he operates mostly on instinct, and long form is a perfect example. When Birkin saw it, he didn't think to himself, some journalistic outfit is just dying to take this off my hands. He fought infinite possibility. In case you couldn't hear that, he said, obviously it's a tax thing. It could be anything. I could see why an accountant would want it.

Yeah, long form, it's sticky, it's memorable, it's brandable. That to me, makes a valuable name. Burkins told me that despite Max and Aaron's suspicions, he didn't create or employ Cameron Gordon to bring the price up. When I brought up how bizarre it was that a bunch of people showed interest in Longform.com at the same time, he said that the bidding war was coincidental and not very common, but it was real. Mark Monitor makes people sign nondisclosure agreements, so he can't say how much he sold it for. All he'd say is that Longform.com is now likely owned by a Fortune 500 or Fortune 1,000 company.

So even though Aaron and Max didn't end up getting Longform.com, there's still a bright side to all of this. Whoever owns it right now, the deal was brokered by the company. the Derek Jeter of domain names. A man who saw more potential in long form than anyone. It's sticky. It's memorable. It could be anything. Reply all is hosted by PJ Vote and me, Alex Goldman. Our producer's Lena Masitis,

and the show is edited by Caitlin Roberts, Starly Kine, and Alex Bloomberg. Matt Lieber is the world's tallest man. Our theme song is by the mysterious breakmaster cylinder, who also did the rest of the music in this episode. Our ad theme is by Build Buildings. If you like the show, please think about reviewing it on iTunes. Believe it or not, it makes a big difference for us.

Our website is not at replyall.com, but you can find it at replyall.fail. Really? That's our website. Give it a shot. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week.