Why Do You Need A Premium Domain Name? Hear From The Buyer Himself!

3 days ago, the CEO of Mercury.co, Immad announced that they purchased the premium domain name Mercury.com. That’s the perfect purchase for the company. However, there’s more! The CEO himself explained how and why they bought the domain.

If you’re questioning yourself why do you need a premium domain name, the following tweets from the SEO himself include some good answers:

1) Excited to finally announce that we are moving from http://Mercury.co to http://Mercury.com @Bankmercury!
This is the end of a 2.5 year domain acquisition story and am excited to finally have the new domain live.

2) Mercury is the Roman God of financial gain. We loved the name and got http://Mercury.co before we even incorporated the company. At the time http://Mercury.com was redirecting to a product on the http://HP.com domain.

3) HP had acquired Mercury Interactive in 2006 and as part of that got the http://Mercury.com domain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_Interactive @pmarca is on the board of HP and after investing in @BankMercury he helped kick off a long chain of emails to figure out who controlled the domain.

4) It turned out that http://Mercury.com was transferred to HPE, then to Microfocus in a series of spinoffs and acquisitions. Microfocus is a $4b public UK based company. Eventually I was introduced to a very friendly person in Utah who was responsible for this domain.

5) After a few back and forth it turned out that Microfocus didn’t want to sell the domain. They felt that there was still some name recognition for the domain (even though it didn’t point to anything) and marketing/sales there didn’t want to sell it.

6) We stayed in contact over 2 years and finally they decided late last year that they were ready to let go of the domain. Being a startup and having a long standing relationship we quickly jumped on the opportunity and were able to close before the domain was on the open market.

7) For many new startups getting the dot com is not important. Nowadays most people are getting to your company via mobile apps or web search where direct name hits don’t matter as much. However for us we felt getting http://Mercury.com was important because..

8)

a-) Trust is crucial in banking. b-) We knew the domain would be bought by someone else if we didn’t act and potentially not available again. c-) We want to be a long term 50+ year company and owning the domain is part of our long term commitment.