We were in a negotiation to purchase photo.com. The asking price was around $1.5M and we had worked out an agreement where we would purchase the domain at a discount (in exchange for revenue share) and make the payments in equal parts over 12 months.
There were target revenue numbers and penalties if we were unable to make the monthly payment of around $80k.
My business does this as a part of its offerings. The deals are usually all custom as they are potentially very valuable domains involved.
Most of the time though they have a buyout component after a certain period of time and they sometimes allow part of the lease payments to apply to the final payment price.
It really just depends. More leverage for the terms on do.com vs say "Ilovewebsiteswithorangeheaders.com"
Noah Kagan did a podcast on the deal he made to buy Sumo.com. Not a straight lease but more like a payment plan. He talks about how Mint.com was purchased this way too.
From their shutdown blog post [0], it looks like they gave users just 9 days warning before they deleted all user data. Also, the login link (still present in the header) takes you to a page they seem to have forgotten to add content to [1].
Well the founders are kinda of stupid to choose 'Do' as their company name, showing zero awareness of SEO. Maybe it is not far in the future, until The startup emerges...!
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 67.5 ms ] threadSalesforce had the domain in 2013, and was an investor in Do.com. The domain may have been on loan/lease.
I previously worked at a startup that was using a domain on a "rent to own" basis. I suspect something similar here.
There were target revenue numbers and penalties if we were unable to make the monthly payment of around $80k.
Thank goodness the deal fell through.
Most of the time though they have a buyout component after a certain period of time and they sometimes allow part of the lease payments to apply to the final payment price.
It really just depends. More leverage for the terms on do.com vs say "Ilovewebsiteswithorangeheaders.com"
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/noah-kagan-presents-form...
I avoid however, to rent from a 3rd party who is the domain owner within the registry.
It seems unlikely that Amazon is overly concerned about the domain name
(Disclosure: I work at Amazon on the totally unrelated product "Go")
[0] http://blog.do.com/post/157299307009/announcing-our-next-cha...
[1] https://www.do.com/login