“This is so fucking stressful,” Jason said. On a group call, all four of us—Jason, Sam, Emanuel, and me—were bidding on something that had long eluded us. 404media.com. Not the .co domain we launched with two years ago because that’s all we could afford. But a fully-fledged .com.
That September day I was on holiday in an Airbnb. Sam was in San Diego to report on the sentencing of a high profile sex trafficker. Emanuel was home. Jason was also at home and eating a bagel. Ordinarily we wouldn’t be able to buy a .com for two main reasons: they are typically quite expensive, and when we created our company the domain was already in use by someone else.
Fortunately for us, that company had seemingly moved on to other things, and the domain was up for auction. I got some emails from our domain registrar about the auction a few days before, and some 404 Media readers contacted us about it too. This was our chance.
But an auction is a very different experience to just buying the domain outright. We would be trying to beat other people or bots. We thought that might include those kindly trying to buy the domain on our behalf, or others trying to take it from underneath us. And we had no idea how high the price might go.
I was in charge of placing the bids themselves. Soon we found I wasn’t able to place bids of a certain size because, we later learned, the account didn’t have the necessary level of verification to do so. We were leading with a bid of $1,207.
A few minutes into our group call, Jason started recording it.
“I think we should just get 202 Media if this doesn’t work,” he said.
“Okay, under one minute until the five minute extension is over,” I added.
Emanuel led a ten second countdown.
“Your bid won,” I read from the screen. Everyone cheered. Here is what we said immediately afterwards:
Right now, our .com domain just redirects to the .co one. Maybe we’ll put an Easter Egg or something else fun on it soon, but we also had practical reasons for buying it. The first is that we’re proud to say 404 Media is a well known publication at this point, and we don’t want anyone else parking and abusing the .com domain that many people may end up at by mistake. The second is that, understandably, many people mistakenly email us at the @404media.com domain rather than the @404media.co domain, so now we’ll be able to catch those lost emails and save us all a lot of heartache.
But our ability to buy the domain signifies something important: that we are able to grow, bit by bit, sustainably. When we launched 404 Media in August 2023, we each put $1,000 in. That was to pay for the domain, the content management system (CMS) and website host we use called Ghost, some other add-ons that automatically send people emails, and that’s about it. Buying a .com was a pipedream then, just like running a website and podcast years later was.
Since then we’ve built a fulltext RSS feed for our subscribers (something that didn’t exist with Ghost before); run multiple in-person events; and most recently produced a physical zine. All while reporting and writing cutting edge journalism on technology and AI and how they are really impacting humans every day.
Thank you to all of our paying subscribers who make it possible for us to write impactful journalism every day. And let us buy a new domain.
