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pizza.com Sold For $2.6m
f8d noted a beeb bit on the fact that the pizza.com domain name was sold for a ridiculous 2.6m bucks. Can there be a bubble and a recession at the same time, or do the two cancel each other out like Penn & Teller?
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s/their/there/;
That was a STEAL. Just think of the marketing budget of any of the standard delivery places (Pizza Hut, Papa Johns, etc). This is not even a blip on that radar. I just hope it was a pizza place. God help us all if it was a porn company.
Buying a ton of domain names on the cheap in the mid 90's would have been a sound investment.
If it isn't a pizza company, I say we abandon domain names and go back to numeric addressing.
These stories are free but worth money.
I've PERSONALLY been so hungry I couldn't make it to google, typing "pizza" directly into the URL bar AT LEAST 50,000 times, spending $20+ dollars each time. If there's a couple of more people out there like me, they've already broken even.
your kidding! their's no such think as a resession!
yesterday I had a conversation with someone about "monetizing eyeballs" on a "custom portal" after which I played you don't know jack online.
Quite clearly we are in a mobius loop like that tng episode. It is now 2001.
I'd like to break out of the loop before my angel investors screw me this time.
First, America is going through a recession because of our debt, combined with our realizing that we have overspent. OTH, Europe, japan, canada, etc are all picking up speed while the dollar continues to plummet due to our federal and trade deficits. Hopefully, the next president will be responsible.
Second, the net remains one of the best places to lower your costs. Far cheaper than having a building and ppl. 2.6M? That is nothing.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
A major pizza maker will spend more than that on TV advertising every month. It's nothing in the big scheme of things.
No sig today...
To those who are talking about how 2.6 mil is nothing to a pizza chain I ask: How are you going to get the public aware of the fact that pizza.com even exists? Personally, if I wanted pizza I'd type dominospizza.com or pizzahut.com as a first guess at anything pizza related online. Even as a computer literate person I can draw from experience that most generic domain names are link farms and still not go to pizza.com. Maybe the pizza stores have to advertise their new site on tv for another 2..... oh wait
... the domain transfer took more than 30 mins, so it was free.
If only their was a homophone for pizza.
In any case, the article states nothing of the actual asking price. It could be that the even in a bubble, the asking price was too high, and the owner, seeing a recession, lowered the price. Or it could be that in a recession, in which everyone is losing their homes, and few people know how to cook, pizza delivery is a good compromise food for the small apartments many families will move to. Pizza.com could be success story of the recession.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Back in 1995, my friends and I were looking for domains to register. One of the domains we considered was pizza.com. We decided to skip it, as we didn't want to invest $35/yr on a domain we would probably never use.
*bangs head on desk*
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
How much would each extra topping be then? $100,000?
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
A recession and a bubble at the same time? Of course. When oil and bank corps, and the people who own & run them are bathing in record profits (above the records set every year for the past decade and a half, above the records set every year except maybe one or two of every twenty for the past few centuries), but literally millions of people are getting their homes foreclosed, millions more are always 6 weeks paychecks from losing their homes, income has shrunk over the past 25 years while prices have doubled, tripled or more (especially oil/gas prices and bank fees)...
Of course there's a recession and a bubble possible. Where do you think that bubble money comes from? And do you think that when it pops, everyone loses their shirt? Or maybe the rich people who run the country (*cough* Bear Stearns *cough*) will never see any real risk, while the poor are as free as the rich to sleep under a bridge.
The biggest lie about "the economy" is that it's "the" economy. There are separate economies for the rich and everyone else, shunted and fed back into each other separately. Except the rich economy has a siphon into the other economy.
--
make install -not war
what's it called when the market goes crying to the government for a bailout because it couldn't 'self regulate'?
+1 fashionably cynical
I was discussing this at lunch yesterday with some coworkers, and most of us thought it was an incredible waste of money. How many people do you know that when they want something, they open up their browser and just type what they want plus .com right into the address bar? Only complete fools do that and I'm honestly sure that population subset is very small and made up of old people.
One guy was defending their position rather well though, he basically said that whenever you do non-internet advertising, such as on television or the radio, having a very simple URL is a necessity for having people remember it for later on.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
*shakes head*
There, not their...
Still #1 -- Lonely Gay Geek
Can their be a bubble and a recession at the same time, or do the two cancel each other out like Penn & Teller?
Of course there can, and that's exactly what is happening. There is too much venture capital out there and few good places to invest it. There is a recession because oil and other commodities have cut into corporate profits and a bubble because billions of VC funding is available, due to GWB's tax cuts for the rich.
Reagan's trickle-down policies caused a simiilar bubble (in derivatives) in 1987, A decade later, more easy Fed money caused Venture Capitalists to invest in high-tech stocks, causing the famous dot-com bubble and bust.
A recession is when lots of poor and middle class people lose their jobs; a bubble is when a few VCs all decide to put their money in the same place at the same time, driving up prices but not value or production.Which is what's happening now.
Why is 2.6M for one of the most recognized words in the English (and other) languages ridiculous?
Dominos Pizza Market Cap: $843,000,000
Papa John's Market Cap: $725,000,000
Pizza Hut 2007 Sales: $26,000,000
It is our trade deficit and federal gov. deficit that is dragging us down. The prime rate went up BECAUSE of the other 2 deficits. We need to attract money back here. The sub prime bubble was burst BECAUSE of the primate rate going up. And who pushed through the loosening of all of this? The Dems? Yeah. RIGHHHHTTTT. They were not even in power in congress from '96 through 2006. And they have not controlled the white house from 2000 on. And yet all the laws for this was during the 200X time. This is a PURE republican mess, just like the S/L was.
Only 82 years to go!
So, was it bought by a pizza maker, or by someone who is going to sell it the a pizza maker for ever more?
assignment != equality != identity
I am thinking of putting up my domain of relax.com.au up for sale .. I'm thinking this would be a top level "want" in .au .. insurance, resorts, etc .. find me a buyer and I'll send 5% your way .. looking for 1.5 Mil to start.
He owns both armor.com and armour.com he has bee approached by folks looking to buy one or the other (or both) names ... but he has never been even offered even serious six figures. Even the Hormel people never came up with real cash. Meh.
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
Just because one item sold expensively doesn't mean the recession is impossible anyways.
I see at least two uses for pizza.com that could easily be worth $2.6 million:
1) Some major pizza chain uses it as their modern, easy-to-remember "phone number". If I wanted to order a Domino's Pizza (which I don't), I wouldn't know whether to go to dominos.com, dominospizza.com, dominopizza.com, domino-pizza.com, etc. Putting pizza.com in their conventional advertising and repeating it for years would eventually get a lot of people going there.
2) An independent business makes it easy to find and order pizza based on location. I live in a big city and have a cheeseload of pizza places around, but a surprising number of them won't deliver to my street. If one web site could tell me who will deliver to me, their menu, their price, and their current special deals, that'd be very useful.
I wouldn't look for milk at milk.com and I wouldn't buy fuel for my car at gas.com, but pizza is one item where easy access to information and ordering makes sense.
2.5 million? Bah, a mere bagatelle!
Do lunch!
I'll have my people call your people!
Tennis anyone?
Please wait while I hang my sweater over my shoulders and sip a "double latte, half caff, golden calf, (insert French word(s) here) with non-dairy whipped topping".
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Political bullshit, makes no sense. This is a financial problem.
Make no mistake, it sucks that we have to talk about this. But it had to be done.
Since you're apparently more of an expert on this than Ben Bernanke (who spent much of his career studying the Great Depression), let's hear what you would've done.
Three things:
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Bubble and recession at the same time? Uh... this is just one company buying a domain name for $2.6M. Taken in isolation this information tells us nothing other than the fact that one company thought that particular domain name was worth $2.6M.
Besides, no bubble brings all prices sky high, and no recession ever brings all pricing to the floor. Whatever the larger economic picture, there will always be companies taking risks and companies playing it safe.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
nuff said
to hire a serious designer and coder.
Cluttered main page but no order form. No IP geolocation. No ZIPs outside North America. No opening hours. Zoom into map -> no results, you have to enter an address. No indication of who will actually deliver to your address.
People who are so desperate that they enter "pizza" in the URL bar want a pizza NOW. They'll just find the site confusing and frustrating, and leave.
At least this pizza was free.
And as of right now, its only $10K. You better hurry though, there's only a week left ...
Sure, if you make $100,000 you pay probably 50% in taxes, when you include both sides of FICA, since you really are paying the employer half yourself even though you don't know it. If you live in a high tax state that can go up to nearly 60%. It sucks.
But if you make $100K+ for very long unless you are stupid you will have invested some of it, and your dividends and long term (>1 year) capital gains are taxed at much lower rates (0% in 2010, that's what would become permanent if the "Bush tax cuts" become permanent!) People that are worth millions generally make the huge majority of their income in dividends and capital gains, unless they are someone like a pro athlete making millions in actual salary and endorsements.
While I can agree with the logic that it is bad to tax investments because they help create jobs, taxing labor is even worse because it makes it much harder for workers to save enough money to become investors.
That's why I think the flat tax is just as dumb as the current system and we should go a national sales/VAT tax like what fairtax.org supports. Give everyone a rebate on the first x dollars they spend and then charge a flat 25% or whatever it takes on everything else to get us to where the gov't breaks even, or ideally pays off a couple hundred billion a year on the deficit.
Add to that a law that requires a balanced budget (or that yearly surplus) and the only way Congress can vote for new spending is if they vote to raise the tax rate an extra percent or two. Bet there's even less support for the Iraq war if Bush has to go asking Congress to raise our VAT to 26% to pay for it, and it would be a lot easier to go after wasteful crap like the bridge to nowhere.
Douglas W. Goodall, goodall.com, goodall.org
P.S. People keep saying we are going to country based domain names, but then they have been saying that for years, and making a bunch of money on registration, then it doesn't really happen.
Maybe it would have been cheaper to trademark the name "PIZZA" then just grab the domain name. The brib at the trademark authority might have been cheaper (just kidding).
As for the bailout, you have obviously not educated yourself as to the deal behind it either. It's a 'bailout' in the loosest of terms. After the liquidity concern was reported, Bear Stearns was trading from ~$57 down to ~$30. Over the weekend, Hank Paulson (Secretary of Treasury) decided that he would not put $30 billion of taxpayer money at risk, unless JPMorgan paid a really low price for Bear Stearns. The reason? Moral hazard. Specifically, Paulson wanted to use Bear as an example that would scare all the other banks that borrowed $32 for every dollar of equity to buy CDOs and other difficult-to-value securities. Paulson wanted to wipe out Bear shareholders so they would be reluctant to seek government help if they got into trouble.
And that was as a result of misunderstanding JP Morgan's loan to assist liquidity. JP Morgan only provided it for the weekend, whereas Bear Stearns CEO thought it was for 28 days. So Bear Stearns had an option of either filing for Bankruptcy on Monday, or take the $2 buyout deal. So with a heavy hand, they had to take the buy-out.
Well, maybe two entries in a database, but still...
someone paid someone else almost three million dollars to essentially have their own nameservers listed next to a domain in the COM gtld zone. This hurts my brain.
Could someone please add these two lines to the US gtld zonefile?
president IN NS ns1.example.org.
president IN NS ns2.example.org.
It should only take 10-20 seconds. Maybe you could have your secretary do it if you don't have that kind of time.
That would be swell.
If you see a domain owned by someone else and you sign up for one of these programs that lets you swoop in and steal it the moment that it is available and then send an email offering to sell it back for large sums of money then that is theft and blackmail.
If you leave your front door unlocked and I pay some kid to come into your house and steal stuff for me then does that make it my stuff? How about if I'm a network admin and I see that you left embarrassing photos of yourself on my system - can I then just charge you a large sum of money not to write your name on the photos and post them on Usenet?
I can only imagine you must be one of the vultures that steal from other people rather than creating any real value on your own. Such people are scum no better than any other thief. Any idiot knows how to steal stuff but most of us have morals and don't do it.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
domain name... I find this bodes well. :-)
No wait, I got one. The peanut is neither a pea, nor a nut.
Oh wait... yes it is.