In one of our  weekly domain sales reports in June 2017, I wrote about plausible but unconfirmed speculation that the Ring video doorbell company had paid $1 million to buy the Ring.com domain name in 2014. That number has now been confirmed. As you probably heard Amazon bought Ring a few days ago in a deal valued at more than $1 billion. Thanks to eagle-eyed domain investor George Kirikos, I  learned that shortly after the sale, a mutual friend, Digimedia.com President Jay Chapman, tweeted out a link to a podcast interview that Danny Fortson did with Ring CEO & Chief Inventor Jamie Siminoff in August 2017. About midway through that 43-minute interview Siminoff revealed that he had indeed paid $1 million to acquire the domain name.

Even more interesting are the details Siminoff revealed about the purchase in a five-minute stretch of the interview that starts at the 26:15 mark. If anyone ever wanted to make

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a case for the enormous value of a great domain name in building a business, Siminoff does it in those five minutes. Siminoff revealed that in 2014, with his company then known as Doorbot, he only had $187,000 in the bank when he approached the owner of Ring.com (then privately held by a Minnesota doctor). When the doctor told him the price Siminoff said "I don't have a million dollars but I will give you $187,000 now and another $825,000 in two years for the domain" (which would be the $813,000 balance and an extra $12,000 in interest). The doctor accepted and Siminoff lived up to his word (we have charted the sale on our 2016 Top 100 Sales Chart - at #5 - since that was the year the final payment was made).