When the .photo TLD was announced, I really, really wanted to grab daniel.photo for myself. I pre-registered it, which isn’t a guarantee, but it was worth a shot. On April 15th, 2014, the TLD was released, but I didn’t get it. My pre-registratin money was refunded. Of course, a domain hoarder had already purchased it. Turns out Uniregistry is the manager of the domain, and their brokers were trying to sell it for whoever purchased it. I emailed them (Uniregistry/Domain Name Sales) to see what kind of price they were looking for…
Hi Daniel,
My name is [xxx], and I’m in the Customer Relations Department with DomainNameSales.com. We represent the current owner of daniel.photo.
I discussed this with my client and based on many criteria, their expectations are $6,700.00.
Please call me at [xxx] if you would like to discuss the rationale behind this evaluation, and next steps.
$6700?! It definitely wasn’t worth that much to me, so I countered with a $100 offer. They declined.
Daniel,
The seller and I just spoke. There is no way we can make a deal.
We are very far apart (A lot of money).
I thought about it, and you should really consider registering another website name at our partner registrar Uniregistry.com.
These are only ten dollars, but will grow in value like this one.
“Grow in value like this one.” Please. It didn’t have a chance to grow in value–they scooped it up as soon as the TLD dropped.
Uniregistry continued to email me to see if I was still interested, and I offered less and less every time.
July 6th 2016 was the last time I heard from Uniregistry. I assumed someone had bought it–it’s a great domain name for a photographer, and someone who makes a good living off photography can justify paying a higher price.
Fast forward to December 2017. For some reason, the domain name popped into my head again, so I checked it.
Nobody owned it, so I snagged it for just over $100. It’s considered a premium domain, so I couldn’t get away with the usual $10 Google Domains purchase.
What are your thoughts about folks who buy up domains just to try to sell them at stupidly inflated prices? If another photographer had bought the domain when the TLD was released, I’d have been fine with it. But these scavengers irritate the hell out of me.
Another question–what are your thoughts on the new TLDs? Do you think they confuse people? Or are they awesome. Personally, I think it’ll take a while before people get used to URLs that don’t end in the familiar .com, .net, etc., but it’ll happen.
Daniel Hedrick 
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