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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.
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...
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.
$ 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 <<<
--
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
It's a pretty logical URL for someone to enter: www.business.com.
I disagree; I think that this was a phenomenal waste of money and my heartiest congratulations go to Mr Ostrofsky.
Domain dipping is only effective in the specific; if you're looking for the world's most-hyped beverage, do you type www.coke.com or www.cola.com? Similarly, no-one looks for Linux under www.operating-systems.com, and I would suspect entrepreneurs would look at a number of things -- www.entrepreneur.com, www.capital.com et al, and www.business.com will be but one of many they try.
business.com sounds like it's the sort of thing that will be effective, so ecompanies bought it without really thinking of whether it was worth it. A few minutes consideration and they'd have run away. I think.
Ostrofsky also will become an adviser to
business.com.
If you're going to hire an advisor, you might as well hire one that's capable for selling a domain for thousands of times its worth.
Check out: http://www.buisness.com/
(spell carefully)