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$7.5m for Domain Name
Grey writes "The Age has a report that a Houston entrepreneur
sold the name "business.com" for US$7.5 million.
" Sheesh - I thought the Altavista domain name sale was really high. I think it's time for to start auctioning off such great names as Cowboyneal.net, CmdrTaco, and, of course, hemos.net. Do I hear 1 billion? *grin*
Only stupid businessmen would ever enter such an loosely defined address as www.business.com. Businessmen have money. Stupid businessmen can easily have their money removed from them. Stupid businessmen are therefore a very profitable market. Thus www.business.com is well worth $7.5m.
QED
Regards, Ralph.
The market for domain names is pretty interesting. You hear about these sales for fabulous amounts of money, but for the most part it seems to be all sellers and no buyers.
... I'd probably sell.
I have one worthwhile domain name, amazing.com. The GreatDomains.com valuation page claims it's worth "between $ 50,000 and $ 1 million". At the same time, it sure looks to me like most of the domains on there sit for a long time without a single offer. Once someone gets interested, they hold an auction and get the big bucks; but the majority of name holders get basically ignored by the company, as far as I can tell. Personally, I've never received an offer (directly, without their help) over circa $ 10k, which probably doesn't even represent the value (for me, anyway) of my present search engine positions.
Truth to tell, I'm really ambivalent about selling. I like having the name. It's certainly prestigous. I don't have to tell people how to spell it. I like to think I've built a "personal brand" around the name that a lot of people enjoy. At the same time, if it could give me the kind of money that would change my life
Any thoughts about how to get the best possible price for my name? Anyone been through the procedure of selling a name for serious money?
D
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"It's so darned general, it almost makes you think it could be a search engine for business related sites"
That's actually a pretty good idea. Run a business directory, list all (or as many as you can) businesses, break 'em down into categories, do reviews, etc. Charge a buck to register as a business and have a subscription-based thing for the customer (two or three bucks for all of the juicy details of all businesses in a certain category), or do a charge-per-look kind of a thing (a quarter per business search).
While I understand that all of the information is already free and readily avaliable to the public, I think people might pay for the convenience of having it all in one place.
The customer is happy because they can dig up dirt on competetors, find the exact, perfect business to suit their needs, and do this faster than going to the BBB with more info than the yellow pages can provide. The business is happy because, hey, cheap advertising.
Would this work, or have I just had too much crack this morning?
Jedi Hacker (Apprentice) and Code Poet
censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence - Crash Culligan
How about .adu for adult or .cum for well, you know? The only way to get more url's is to get rid of the Internic monopoly. Personally, I would love to see adult sites move thier names over to a domain that they can all use. Filtering would be easier, companies could block it with proxy servers, and I could remember names better. I think that .xxx is a little too cliche but you do have a point.
Romanes eunt domus? People called Romanes, they go the 'ouse? It says Romans go home. No it doesn't. What's Latin fo
Think about it, there is only one reason to buy these domain names:
Thousands of normal people are using the net for the first time every day, they don't know a thing about search engines and are told to type the name of the place they wish to visit in that little white box. Many of them try a common English word, with '.com' at the end.
And most of the English speakers in the world still haven't used the Web even once!
www.business.com and several other names are one of the hottest investments, because they will definitely increase in value, and really fast.
www.wallstreet.com sold for $1 million, and for the same reasons.
Because now, in Korea, there are banks that will give you a mortgage to buy your domain name!
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Exigo spamos et dona ferentes
It seems just a little odd to me that a "name" should carry this much weight. I guess in a way, it is similar to the three traditionally most important things in business: location, location and location. I suppose to some (at least eCompanies) this could be considered the "corner store on the busiest street in the world" but, $7.5 million? As the Internet continues to grow and become more of a standard way of doing business, how important will this "name" be? Is it important now? It seems to me that this is in line with the tremendous over-valuation of many new Internet companies. If a company has a .com in it's name BAM! here's $1 billion in market capital. Another instance of this hysteria is Microsoft's purchase of Hotmail. I forget the enormous amount they paid for it, but I remember thinking it was waaaaaay to much. I mean FREE email? Wooo-hooo! It's gonna take a lot of banner ads to pay that off. It will probably be quite sometime (if ever) before they can recoup that investment or maybe, just maybe, they did it for a tax write-off. I know if you end up with too much money at the end of the year, Uncle Sam comes callin' wanting (more than) his share.
Or, maybe I just have no foresight.
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"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
Hmmm... What could I possibly bid for hemos.net that would truly be worthy?
I know - I'll give you $35, (rummaging through my desk) a PC Card placeholder for your laptop, a chocolate Balance bar, three Pepcid AC tablets, a serial/PS/2 adapter, and a slightly used Pentium motherboard from some no-name manufacturer.
Do we have a deal, or what?
I'll even throw in a couple of those free Home Depot "remodeling your home"-type pamphlets - you could probably use one of them...
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Actually, why don't we do something like the great renaming of 1986. Say 1st Jan 2000. IPV6 and forced change of domain names together?
This should clean up a huge mess.
Disclaimer, I am not familiar with the details of 1986, except what I got from the jargon file.
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
Nice site - thanks for letting me know about it.
D
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Reminds me of the short-lived portal site "www.com". They thought they could make money from domain name recognition and their (bogus) claim that they were "the first site on the Internet".
You'll notice the portal isn't there anymore. It's some kind of Internet radio site now.
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Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
That is the exact same message that they had at first, except it said "next generation Web portal" instead of "next generation music netcasting company".
Now let's translate this into fact... A couple of years ago, when the domain name system started to become completely corrupted, some guy thought he could get rich by registering the domain "www.com" and selling it. Little was done with the name in the years that followed until, in 1999, a group of marketroids paid a suitably large amount of money for it and decided they could make it a portal site. After the portal site died, they decided that netcasting was more "in" and tried that instead.
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Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
$0.01 for 'hemos.com'
Tony
I propose the final solution to domain name problems. Lets let more that one person use a domain name. This way, when I go to slashdot.org there will be say, one in five chance of getting the site I want. At other times I might get the home page of the Punctuation Society or the maybe the homepage of someone who miss-read the registration form.
The next stage of the plan would be to add one to all IP address every Tuesday to make things more fair...
Maybe $7.5 million dollars is a lot of money. However, consider today how much money is getting made on the web. If the implementer of the domain does it right, this will be a small price to pay. I only wish I had the money and the idea of what to do with it :-)
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
Recently, some guy went and spent a pretty penny (or thousands and thousands of pounds) buying up the remainder of the three-letter domains in the UK. I can imagine him being able to sell some, but there's going to be hundreds left that he owns. This would be all well and good for him if he didn't have to pay the renewal fee in just under 2 years time ...
Interesting to think that, technically, since last week, this is illegal here in Australia .com.au domains - Melbourne IT. You can't register a .com.au domain unless it is your company name - i.e. fred bloggs inc can only have something similar to www.fredbloggs.com.au.
That is, buying a domain name and selling it is illegal (unless the company is declared bankrupt and the domain name is one of it's assets).
Mind you domain name laws have always been more strict in Australia - just look at the distributor of
The thought that just because you have a common name and so people would flock to you is so misguided. How common place, say 10 years ago would names like yahoo, lycos, altavista (may be astala vista), or eBullShit have been. This Great Domain names are just milking the hell out of ignorant MBAs who think they know the nerd mind because they have 5 programmers working under them and they have an 'e' in front of their company's name. Nonsense. How many of you go to www.search.com to search for web pages. In the next few years thats how many will go to business.com to do business. There is nothing in a name.
And first up is "com.com". Bidding starts at 30 million dollars! 31 million! 32 million! 35 million! Do I hear 40 million? 40 million, plus a packet of M&M's! Going once, going twice, sold to the blubbering idiot for 40 million and some M&M's!
Seriously, domain names are getting seriously over-valued. (Assuming they weren't, already.) When the bubble bursts, there are going to be some severely out-of-pocket suckers, conned into the idea that a few words will make them rich and lured by the promise of a quick buck for no effort.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I was planning on inserting it on another thread, but I'll put it up for hemos.net instead!
Someone with a grievance against Toys-R-Us registered "toys-r-us.co.uk". Have a look:
http://www.toys-r-us.co.uk/
-Stephen
$ whois sloppylargetitties.com
.com, .net, and .org domains can now be registered with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net for detailed information.
[rs.internic.net]
Whois Server Version 1.1
Domain names in the
No match for "SLOPPYLARGETITTIES.COM".
>>> Last update of whois database: Tue, 30 Nov 99 00:40:30 EST <<<
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Xenu loves you!
Yeah, a good name doesn't hurt, BUT..
I'll take three examples. Ebay, Amazon, Yahoo. Hmmmmmmmmmm... anyone tell me what ebay is? What the excalamation yahoo! has to do with searching? What large, tall, strong women and/or a river has to do with books? And yet, those are highly successful internet companies, each really breaking some new ground and are pretty recognizable names.
In short, "it's the marketing, stupid." Next.
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
My main gripe, as it were, with domain names, is the fact that, even now, American companies, institutions et.c. automatically go for .com, .org, et.c., and this causes a large part of the domain name congestion that seems to be occurring. If there had been a better way of enforcing things, it might have been better for these generic TLD suffixes (ie .com, .org)to be restricted only to international and internet-only organisations, and use .com.usa or .co.usa etc for companies whose sole 'empire' is likely to be 'local'.
It seems to me that if things had operated more logically, then I'd have been 'educated' into looking for ford.co.usa for American cars, and ford.co.uk for British, instead of immediately starting off at the generic ford.com
I'd also like to know what the difficulty seems to be with generic TLD's. I know there were seven new ones coming 'real soon now', but what happened to that? Why isn't adding even more than that a simple process? Why dont we have .news, .music, .linux or whatever?
White Rabbit
free experimental electronic music netlabel at www.viablehybrid.com
The 'c' doesn't make much of a difference, because exite.com just refers you to excite.com. They are registered by different corporations, however, and this behavior might change sometime in the future.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Your site's domain name doesn't matter if users find you via search engines, other site links, or bookmarks! I think that generic names like Business.com don't have that much "power". Who would type in Business.com, unless they already knew about it? A user would probably go to AltaVista/Yahoo/whatever and search for "business". Search engines don't care what your domain name is..
cpeterso
I learned my lesson after the Toronto Sun acted like total assholes and stiffed me when they asked for and I gave them my old domain, canoe.com. I only asked for three things:
I should have known that something was wrong when I got the notification that the canoe.com domain was being transferred before I'd even put in the form for xcski.com. And I never got the damn tickets either.
So I said right then and there that I'm not going through that again, not without demanding big bucks and making sure I had them in my hand.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Whether or not Cybersquatting is right or wrong is very subjective. And there really isn't going to be a quick easy answer. Of course, Big Brother can always step in and make a "law" about it (and they will one day, you have to KNOW that). Personally, if a squatter has a domain name someone wants, then look into other possibilities. Add a "-" between words or something. Shows the squatter that you aren't that hard up for the domain. Of course, people who pay millions for domain names send a bad message to the squatters. They say "it's profitable"; I personally think it's wrong, but what the hey---if you've the money and the inclination to make squatting profitable to someone, then it's your money!
---"Without education there is only ignorance"
Mike O'Connor is the guy that owns or did own televison.com as well as a bunch of other such domains (Bar.com, Cafes.com, Company.com, Corp.com, Grill.com, Haven.com, Place.com, Pub.com, Shelter.com -- if business.com got $7.5million, then maybe company.com will get a comperable sum, since they're both equally silly). At one point he was offered US$1.1million, so whatever he's getting out of the current arrangement with mktv.com is probably more than that.
If you want some historical information (circa 1998) about the sale of altavista.com, you can also go here.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
BRANDING is something that's generally done to cattle. don't let anyone trick you into thinking otherwise.
Question for you. Ignore totally how anyone feels about just plain cybersquatting and reselling of domain names. That's not the issue here.
You are starting an Internet business. Does it not stand to reason that when you start said business, you will register the domain before you ``go into business'' proper, and will have an ``under construction'' page?
Just something to think about... there may very well be legitimacy behind those pages. I might also add that it is still possible (last time I checked) to run a domain without even having a site attached to it.
Check out: http://www.buisness.com/
(spell carefully)
A nice *shiny* nickel too!
:-)
I'll even toss in some dryer lint. How about it Hemos?
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- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.