\u201cThis is so fucking stressful,\u201d Jason said. On a group call, all four of us\u2014Jason, Sam, Emanuel, and me\u2014were bidding on something that had long eluded us. 404media.com. Not the .co domain we launched with two years ago because that\u2019s 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\u2019t 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.\u00a0Fortunately 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\u2019t able to place bids of a certain size because, we later learned, the account didn\u2019t 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.\u201cI think we should just get 202 Media if this doesn\u2019t work,\u201d he said.\u201cOkay, under one minute until the five minute extension is over,\u201d I added.Emanuel led a ten second countdown.\u201cYour bid won,\u201d I read from the screen. Everyone cheered. Here is what we said immediately afterwards:\u00a0A transcript of some of the group call.Right now, our .com domain just redirects to the .co one. Maybe we\u2019ll 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\u2019re proud to say 404 Media is a well known publication at this point, and we don\u2019t 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\u2019ll 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\u2019s about it. Buying a .com was a pipedream then, just like running a website and podcast years later was.\u00a0Since then we\u2019ve built a fulltext RSS feed for our subscribers (something that didn\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"