BullAtomSci.org Sale

I notice on today's NameBio daily domain sales report that the domain name BullAtomSci in the .org extension sold yesterday.  The name attracted my attention, because I know very well of the valuable work of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

What is The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists?

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists are best known for maintaining the Doomsday Clock, which is an indication of global dangers.  The clock, started during the cold war period in 1947, is currently set at 2 minutes to midnight. The group periodically assess all types of risks and update the setting on the clock.

They also publish a journal, with the organization and publication started by biophysicist Eugene Rabinowitch and physicist Hyman Goldsmith.  Many prominent scientists (and other academics and thinkers) have contributed to the journal over the years including (among many others) Hans Bethe, Max Born, Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Bertrand Russell, and Edward Teller.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists cover a variety of articles on different types of threats, from nuclear weapons to climate change to biochemical or biological. A couple of years ago the publication of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists started being published in partnership with Routledge, Francis and Taylor Group.

The Domain Name BullAtomSci.Org

The domain name that just sold, BullAtomSci.org,  has been registered for 21 years.  Originally it was certainly used by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists as this capture using the internet archive WayBack Machine from 2006 shows.

In 1999 the domain name TheBulletin.org was registered, and for the past decade it has been used by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.  It is a highly visited and respected site, placing in the top 500,000 sites in the world (from a total of about 1.9 billion sites in the world).  I suspect that the rebranding was related to the movement away from a narrow prior focus on nuclear weapon risk to a more general consideration of multiple global risks.

Now I am not clear exactly when, or how, the organization gave up or lost control of their original domain name, but as this WayBack Machine capture from September 2017 shows, over the last few years although the site used the title of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in the heading, it clearly has nothing to do with the organization really.

Traffic was modest during the last year on the BullAtomSci.org website, and estimated ad revenue for the site small, according to sources such as CuteStat.com. I presume whoever held the domain name felt that it was more profitable to try to sell it, which has now happened.  The really interesting question is whether the buyer is the previous owner, the real Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, or someone else.  If someone else, what do they plan to do with the domain name? Or was it simply purchased by a domain investor hoping to resell the name?

Domain Sale and Lessons Learned

This saga demonstrates the dangers of not protecting your previous domain name when you rebrand to a new site. I am surprised that the obvious attempt of an unrelated owner to benefit from the name was not legally challenged (if it was not).  There are annual renewal costs off maintaining a domain name you no longer actively use, but letting go of a name with traffic comes with lost opportunity costs.

The domain name BullAtomSci.org sold July 29, 2018 on GoDaddy for $820.  In the NameBio database, there are no publicly recorded previous sales of the domain name, although when one uses the GoDaddy GoValue estimation tool it shows (without date) a previous sale at a price of $980.  For those reading this from outside the domain community, there is no requirement to publicly announce sales prices of domain names, so the public record is an incomplete one in most cases. Many sales are announced however, with sources such as NameBio including more than $1.6 billion in domain name sales.

I don't know the full story behind the most recent domain name sale, and with the new privacy legislation it is harder to track domain name owners.   If you are associated with either party in the sale, and want to provide additional details on the transaction and future plans, please contact me directly or share information through the comments section of this blog.

Update

The domain name now resolves to a monetized links parking page.  It does not specifically mention that the domain name is for sale. According to ICANN WHOIS the new owner is a privately held Hong Kong based holding company.

Main Links:

• The sale of BullAtomSci.org domain name at NameBio database
• Current home of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
• About Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Wikipedia)
• WayBack Machine archive
• GoDaddy GoValue 
• NamesThat.win 
• Direct link to this article

This article was originally posted on July 30,2018.
The update section at the end of the article was added on Aug 6, 2018

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