Discord.com Domain Sale

The noun discord means a disagreement between people. The founders of the app, at the time, felt like this was the case with most gaming communities and no platform really provided any solution. The solution was a new VOIP platform, meaning Voice over Internet Protocol. They aimed to provide community servers to gamers where they could connect both through chat and calls. Discord quickly became one of the leading communication platforms. It also became the leading gaming communication platform, and still is to this day. It stands out by having invite-only servers. These can have sub-servers and different roles for their users.  

These roles grant users with different actions within the respected communities. For example, an admin can create new sub-servers, remove people whereas a normal member can only request to join sub-servers and comment in those. By having these features, the platform provides more secure servers which different users can tailor for their audiences. Though when Discord was first released, it was of course just a start-up company with high hopes. Like many others, start-ups, they wanted to pinpoint to everyone who they were, and they chose to do that through their domain. DiscordApp.com was an identifying domain, by using the noun app, they wanted to show who they are. But after years of success, they had already claimed their positioning within the market of communication platforms. This leads to the reason why they acquired the Discord.com domain sale. 

Why Was the Discord.com Domain Name Acquired?

The platform quickly became popular among gamers. Esports used it as a main communication channel. Video game streamers on the streaming platform Twitch also created their own communities within the new platform. In 2018, Discord also added support for Xbox Live. This would allow Xbox users to connect with their Xbox friends in Discord. Through such tweaks, the app was positioning itself within a specific audience, tailored for gaming and gamers. Between its creation in 2015 and 2018, Discord launched under the domain DiscordApp.com. Like many start-ups, they wanted to identify who they are through their domain. But a premium domain name can be better for branding a new product. 

The pandemic in 2020 allowed for Discord to change their strategy and rebrand. Many new users had a lot of time on their hands and signed up to Discord to keep in touch with their communities. Up until then, Discord’s slogan was “Chat for Gamers”. From then on, the rebranding really started to kick-off by the slogan changing to “Chat for Communities and Friends”. Not long after, Discord also changed their social media handles from @discordapp to @discord only. Everyone knew who Discord are and what they offered. The noun app was no longer needed as an identifier for that.   

Not only that, but by updating the Discord.com domain name, they were able to introduce new communities and to welcome a new target audience. Although some sources suggest that the Discord.com domain name sale happened in 2017, the only factual statement is that the move to the new domain happened on May 4^th 2020. The company also never disclosed the Discord.com domain price that they paid. Regardless, the deal was successful for the new values of Discord, and we’d like to discuss why. 

Was Purchasing Discord.com Domain a Successful Move?

Based on records, the DiscordApp.com domain name was acquired close to the release of the platform itself in early 2015. The yearly revenue of the company was $5 million after their first year and doubled in the second. By the time of updating to the new Discord.com domain, the year revenue was $10 mil. Considering that in its early stages Discord was against bigger platforms like Skype, they were arguably successful as a start-up. When they first launched, they had approximately 3 million users in the first couple of months. Throughout 2016 and 2017, the registered users peaked to 45 mil. users, but only 10 million were active daily. Why does the old domain still have 73 mil. monthly traffic as of 2023? Because they decided to keep the old domain up. This domain redirects people to their new domain. 

As we can see from the evaluation of the old and new domains of Discord, both were performing well for their stages in time, but one really stands out. Long after the Discord.com domain sale in 2017, the company started increasing all numbers. This is because they only rebranded in 2020. Once they did, however, their yearly revenue was doubling itself quickly. In 2020 the revenue was worth $130 mil. jumping to 300 mi. throughout 2021 and 2022. The new user registrations to the platform also escalated to 300 million in 2022, although only half of which are active on a daily basis. The Discord.com monthly traffic results to 1.1 billion users, making it one of the top 100 visited websites in the USA. The Discord.com domain cost was never made public, but whatever Discord paid, is worth the results they’ve received from it. The following rankings will explain exactly why.  

This chart showing the rankings of the old domain DiscordApp.com shows the generated monthly organic traffic. Organic Traffic in terms of online search results means any clicks in search engines like Google that are not paid for, like advertisements. The shown statistics are from the launching of Discord and its domain in 2015 until late 2021. What we can see from the chart above is that Discord started out very slowly in terms of organic traffic to their website. They reached the point of over 15 million visits just from 2018 onwards. 

Still, until 2020, the numbers weren’t varying much. The visits were hovering above the 15 million line but never dropping below it. When the pandemic happened, as we already established, many people were attracted to connect with their friends and communities over Discord. This led to the highest peak of organic traffic to the website. In April 2020, the website received just over 42 million visits, the highest number ever. And once the new premium domain name was announced in May 2020, the numbers flatlined almost immediately. The Discord.com domain took over and improved the company’s traffic with little to no effort, as we can see in the following chart. 

Speaking of organic traffic, the new and improved Discord.com domain name went through the roof with that. The monthly traffic has always been consistent so far since its launch in 2020. The old domain name could barely keep the numbers above 15 million and reached 45 million for a very short amount of time before sinking to zero. This new premium domain name on the other side has managed to keep its organic traffic above 45 million for almost the whole time. The highest peak was in January 2022, when Discord.com attracted almost 54 million users.

By changing their domain name, rebranding and inviting new customers, Discord has done the right thing to grow and expand. The pros in updating your old and basic domain name to a new, attractive and premium domain name are just clear from cases such as Discord. If your brand needs that push, a good domain broker will be able to point out how that is accomplishable and to guide you in the process.