Is anyone selling X.com handles? (1.Viewing)

I've bought two, disputed two (and won) and sold 1

The two I disputed and one are MapleDots & Priide


Priide

MapleDots


Priide is obviously made for sale and made to appeal to an end user, site & X handles.

I made a quick post where you can see how a handle can be marketed

would love to see X create a handle marketplace, where you could list your handle, and X could take a cut.

Has something changed about the X policies that I'm not aware of? If the policies are still the same posting about selling handles doesn't seem to be a smart move.

https://help.x.com/en/rules-and-policies/x-username-squatting

domains said:

would love to see X create a handle marketplace, where you could list your handle, and X could take a cut.

Click to expand...

Check out Telegram's username market place Fragment.

I've been brokering the purchase of social media handles for 19 years now for clients. First one I brokered was a Twitter handle that matched a Canadian city's name. To do it safely (so the handle does not get clawed back or suspended or banned) requires a great deal of expertise and close ties to folks who work at the platform and can 'lend a hand' ... nudge nudge, wink wink. It also requires a substantial budget, almost always five-figures minimum, but in the early days could be done for lower. X/Twitter is very slowly inching towards quoting prices (which start at $25k USD) for the purchase of handles that are not in active use, but they have not announced a marketplace yet. Back in the Twitter days, when I worked at Tucows, we even proposed to Twitter execs a handle marketplace, that Tucows would operate on their behalf, but the Twitter execs at the time were really not focused on revenue, so they passed on the idea. They probably left millions on the table in revenue by saying no that proposal. sigh

I wouldn't even say it's a question of if they left millions, it's how many millions. I know around 2020 the main forum for usernames had at least a dozen middlemen who brokered over $10 million, and 5% fees were the norm. All this while being featured in what seemed like weekly articles about sim swapping, hacking, swatting, scamming, etc. etc. Call me crazy, but I'd bet even today annual sales volumes are in the high eight figures, if not nine.

Now it makes more sense. We started talking about users selling their handles and ended up where X sells their user's "abandoned" handles

the one major risk with handles is the platform can take them back for any reason.

FM said:

Now it makes more sense. We started talking about users selling their handles and ended up where X sells their user's "abandoned" handles

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why would X let people sell things that X owns
seems counter intuitive

You lose your handle and the money if X decides to launch a product / service with the same name.

DomainTrader said:

why would X let people sell things that X owns
seems counter intuitive

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My learning from this thread:

X doesn't "own" unused handles, they take them over, especially when there's an active offer for them.
Why, because they like money. And yes, it's their platform.
Mediaoptions is a broker, so they get inquiries for domains and handles.
Only X can take over handles that they deem "unused".
Brokers work with X to sell "unused" handles.

Back in probably 2007 or maybe even 2006 I remember hearing about Twitter, which was a small but growing social network at the time. Being in domains and knowing about forum handles, I thought I should check Twitter handles because it was close to a 'landrush' type situation. Sooooo many common words were available, but I only registered a handful because I thought they would somehow be able to flag it, and I didn't want to be too obvious and lose them. I probably wouldn't have because it was during an early period where they were likely just glad to see growth in accounts. I used to have @Toronto and another major city out West 'ahem'. I registered a few other three character (LLL) type names, and a few other words. Should have done more and spent more time searching for short popular words like pure, blast, flair, push, strike, beam, the kinds of words companies like to use now. Then Twitter got popular and all the good obvious words got taken up. Then in the 2010's there was a period where if you saw a username had an account but wasn't being used, you could contact Twitter through their support form and request the handle, saying it was for your business or whatever, and often they would just give it to you. I got ones like @ scary & @warfare that way (in the late 2010's my email got hacked, which is another story in itself, and they managed to steal those two Twitter handles, only to get them suspended later, which they still are). If your handle gets 'stolen' it is veeeeery hard to contact Twitter and have them do anything about it, at least it used to be. Today I still have a handful of words and LLL in handles, some I use more than others, but try to login or post at least every few months so that the accounts stay active. Each handle has to have it's own unique email which is a hassle the more you acquire, and I think you can have up to 10 handles on one phone number, and create a 2fa for each handle, the security is a lot more than it used to be but it probably helps to cut down on people losing accounts.