A Brief History of the ReadersUnited.com Domain
UPDATE August 13 Amazon.com has registered three additional related domains:
1. KDPReadersUnited.com
2. KindleReadersUnited.com.
3. AmazonReadersUnited.com
As of August 13th both of these domains contain no content.
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Today, ReadersUnited.com is the website where Amazon.com posted a new letter to readers and authors regarding their dispute with Hachette. We’ve seen several people looking for more info about the domain itself. So, we used a couple of specialty databases to learn more.
The domain name dates back to at least 2002 but has only been owned by Amazon for the past 8 days.
Details
The ReadersUnited.com domain at 176.32.103.188 was acquired and registered by Amazon eight days ago (August 1, 2014) using GoDaddy.com and likely being listed with no ownership data provided (aka “by proxy”) and transferred to a name server (domaincontrol.com, where GoDaddy pages are served from). It’s also very likely the domain contained NO content just a placeholder/”under construction” text.
Yesterday (August 9, 2014) ReadersUnited.com was formally transferred to domain name servers from two domain name management firms that Amazon.com uses and the actual record was updated to show the Amazon.com ownership.
1. Dyn.com
2. UltraDNS (Neustar)
How much did Amazon.com pay. That’s hard to determine (at least at the moment). However, we did find one service listing the page for sale for $349 in January 2014.
One final note. While the current domain registration record is correct and shows the domain was first registered in January 2013, ReadersUnited.com existed with various owners at least back to 2002. In other words, the domain name expired and at various points in time it was registered.
Filed under: Data Files, Management and Leadership, News

About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.