EllipticalTrainers.com: Once a Bloomberg mention, now for sale at New Ventures

Elliptical trainers were born out of a desire to create a low-impact cardio machine that mimics natural movement. In the early 1990s, a Precor engineer named Larry Miller observed his daughter running beside a car; he used her motion as inspiration to invent a machine that simulates walking or running, but without the joint strain.

By 1995, Precor launched the first elliptical trainer: the Elliptical Fitness Crosstrainer (EFX). It was an immediate hit in gyms, praised for its smooth, gliding stride that protected knees and hips.

The timing was right: The internet, in its commercial form, was booming.

Registered in 1999, the domain EllipticalTrainers.com began selling a variety of models of elliptical trainers. It was the dawn of the internet drop-shipping business, backed by an exact match domain name!

Here’s what the web site looked like in early 2000:

Very basic and yet this led to sales in the millions of dollars; the web site was mentioned in Bloomberg in 2000 as a seller of “less known brands” of elliptical trainers.

In late 2014 the web site produced its last recorded capture by Archive.org, showcasing elliptical trainers and information about the benefits of using one. Past that date, the web site appeared broken.

In August 2017 the domain was not renewed, entering “pending renewal or deletion” status at its registrar, Network Solutions.

The registrar did not drop the domain however! A year later, it was moved to New Ventures Services, the domain warehousing arm of NetSol. Its function is to evaluate expired domains at Network Solutions and to take ownership of them without releasing them to the general public.

Almost a decade later, EllipticalTrainers.com is still with New Ventures Services and it’s for sale by the company. The price tag: a whopping $85,088 dollars as a premium domain.

It’s not clear why the registrant of EllipticalTrainers.com failed to renew the domain; our research shows that a person matching one of the registrant’s WHOIS records in 2012 passed away in 2016.

And this is how great, exact match domains are let to expire.

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