April 20, 2006 | Read Time: 1 minute
The Boston Foundation received an unlikely gift from Tom Bird, a Boston-area entrepreneur: the domain name farm.com. The gift ended up bringing in $200,000 for the foundation when it sold the name to Pets United, an online pet-supplies company.
Roger Collins, president of Afternic.com, which brokered the sale, says he believes that charities can expect more gifts like that, as owners of high-value domain names begin to treat them like other assets that have appreciated in value, such as stock or real estate. “Kind of like the painting up in the attic you didn’t know you had,” he says.
“Because the Internet is relatively new, there’s probably more people that are surprised about the value of their domain names,” says Mr. Collins. “They may have registered a name in 1995 or earlier and never thought about how much the value has increased.”
Mr. Collins’s company contacted Mr. Bird after a would-be buyer approached Afternic.com saying it wanted to buy the farm.com domain name. Once he realized the name’s value, Mr. Bird decided to give the rights to the name to the Boston Foundation. And Afternic.com agreed to donate its usual 10-percent fee for brokering the transaction to the foundation as well.
