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OK, hold on here for just a second. I'm busy picking my jaw back up off the floor! If the late great Chicago Cubs baseball announcer Harry Caray was still around, you can bet he would let one of his famous "Holy Cow!" exclamations fly over this news. $460,000 just changed hands at Moniker.com/DomainSystems.com for one fine domain - ME.com. |
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Sales like that have a way of putting the entire industry in a good humor. Sedo.com underscored that point with the #3 sale which, appropriately enough, was Humor.de at $30,449! .Info even got into the act, notching still another five-figure sale, with Tampa.info going for $10,000 in a private transaction. The buyer, Wyvern LLC, is the same group that scooped up NewYork.info for more than $28,000 earlier this year (the highest reported New TLD sale to date). Wyvern's Josh Metnick (who also heads a corporation that owns Chicago.com) told us the company has opened a new metropolitan network at AssociatedCities.com. They are certainly assembling the right parts for that new portal. Wyvern also added Houston.info to their portfolio this week. That $4,000 sale also made our new Top Ten, tying for the final position and giving .info an unprecedented 3 slots on the mainstream chart. Here's a look at the big board for the week ending Sunday, April 11:
Miami's Paul Levine was the seller of FloridaLawyer.com, the #5 domain at $8,500. GreatDomains attracted a nice $6,000 price for a pure 3-number domain,113.com to dial up the 6th position. Moniker/Domain Systems took the next slot with ProCricket.com at $5,900 giving them three of the top seven positions - great news for CEO Monte Cahn who just returned from vacation Monday. Sedo also landed three domains on the big board,
including CityGuide.info in 8th place at $4,773. Though
the public is just starting to hear about .info, this continually
rising end user interest in the extension promises good things to come
in the development arena as well. When you see a ccTLD on our
chart, Sedo is usually the seller as they were in the case of #9
domain DebtFree.co.uk at $4,544. Sedo's Easter basket
was filled with several other sweet sales, especially in Germany's .de
country code. WellnessWelt.de ("Wellness World") sent
for �3,200 ($3,814), L�sungen.de
("Solutions") commanded �3,000 ($3,576) and GarantieFonds.de
("Guarantee Funds") sold for �2,950 ($3,516). Sedo
also collected $1,600 for InfinityUniversity.com and
notched the first significant five-word sale we have seen, CareerAndJobSearchEngine.com,
at $1,499! We know that looks impressive but it only works out
to about 50� a letter! Pool.com had a relatively quiet week. CarpetOutlet.com gave them their only Top Ten entry, tying Houston.info for the final positions at $4,000. Their other reported sales that topped the $2,000 mark hit the CNO (.com, .net, .org) trifecta. TravelGuide.org arrived home with $2,279 in the trunk, CRA.net netted $2,200 and AdSmart.com (or AdsMart.com, depending on where the buyer wants to place the emphasis) went for $2,050. Over at Afternic.com, they were busy salting away $3,995 for PistachioNuts.com (missing our Top Ten by just $5). That comes after they had just sold MacadamiaNuts.com ($3,688) and CashewNuts.com ($2,888) last week. You know how it is with nuts, it's hard to eat just one! Afternic washed them down with several other nice sales this week: R6.net at $2,500, AztecAmerica.com at $2,000 and GotJenna.com at $1,800. They also attracted nice money for a couple of normally hard to move multiple word domains. CorporateGiftIdea.com fetched $1,540 and FillInTheBlanks.com drew $1,500. Just to show you how far the domain market has rebounded in recent months, we also got word of the highest .WS sale we have ever heard of. An anonymous buyer from the Middle East laid out $2,100 to purchase Steroids.ws from NameReach.com. .WS is the Western Samoan country code that has been marketed in other parts of the world as meaning "web site". In the case of this sale, to us it means "we're shocked!" We don't hear much from users of Enom's Club Drop (a drop catching auction service available only to the registrar's resellers), so it is worth noting a decent sale there. An auction for EasyBusiness.com closed at $1,900 this week. In the Pipeline: Looking ahead, Afternic has one of the biggest deals currently moving through the pipeline. An auction for Preview.com ended there at $18,500 on April 9. It is currently in escrow....It look like the good news will continue for .info too. An auction for Voice.info, also at Afternic, closed at $2,888 (also on April 9)....Over at Pool, BlogHosting.com remains stuck in the pipeline. It had closed above $20,000 but still hasn't changed hands there. There were some problems with that auction. The original high bidder (at $26,000) wound up getting booted out. Perhaps the runner-up is balking at paying a price that was run up by a pretender. Our Year-To-Date chart expands from 24 to 27 positions this week to make room for that 460K ME.com blockbuster and the two other sales from the past week (Mirror.com and Humor.de) that easily surpassed our $25,000 chart entry point. Here are all of the biggest reported sales so far in 2004:
.Info stormed the industry castle again this week, racking up a five-figure sale and a trio of four-figure transactions to take the top four positions on our New TLD Top Five chart. Of course you already know about the first three because they attracted enough money to land on the mainstream chart (which is becoming a common occurrence for .info). We believe values will only increase as public awareness in the extension continues to rise. Information is what most people are looking for on the net, so you couldn't have a more natural or immediately understandable extension for a domain. The fact that info means the same thing in most major languages around the world doesn't hurt either. Here is the full chart for the week ending Easter Sunday:
.US fans will be happy to see their favorite extension on the board - though .biz might dispute the results! Here is what happened. Cashback.us went for $600 at Sedo while Sumo.biz sold at the same venue for an almost identical �500. In fact on the day the domain was sold, those 500 Euros converted to $603, a hair above the .US domain. However, for uniformity, we do all currency conversions on the day our weekly column is published. Today (April 13) those 500 Euros had fallen to $597, allowing Cashback.us to nudge ahead of the .biz domain. Sedo won't really care either way since they sold both domains that have a claim on the #5 slot! They also sold Puberty.us for $225. Meanwhile at Afternic, an auction for Machinist.us ended at $425 and the transaction is now in escrow. So, we are starting to hear a little noise from the American country code though it is still a long way from the roar coming from .info. We believe that over time, good keywords and terms in .info, .biz and .us will all find interested buyers, but with .info's fast break out of the gate, .biz and .us may have to wait for their turn in the spotlight. The question is how long that wait will be. With .info over 1 million registrations now and an average of 5,000 net new regs being added every week so far in 2004, it may not be long before buyers (especially small business buyers) will have to turn to .biz and .us in search of available and affordable keywords and terms. With three big new extension sales this week our Year-To-Date New TLD chart expands form 8 to 11 entries, with $4,000 now the price of admission for this list. Tampa.info, Houston.info and CityGuide.info all join the circle of honor:
As always, we welcome all verifiable sales reports from companies, private sellers or individuals with knowledge of an important sale made through any channel. To contribute information and help make this column better, just drop a note to [email protected]. People like Richard Meyer of the American Marketing Corporation provide invaluable help by sending us data for these sales reports each week. Every Tuesday we publish the highest reported domain name sales for the previous week. On Monday our contributors send us their sales data for the previous 7 days. We then compile that information and write this report for Tuesday publication to give you the freshest sales report in the industry. We will close with this standard caution. These are not average selling prices - these are top selling domains. One of the biggest impediments to making sales is pricing domains at unrealistic levels. For most of us, pricing domains at the levels achieved on the Top Ten chart will leave us waiting a long time to make a sale! We hope you will use the information presented here as a measuring stick that will help you price your domains at levels that will put more money in your pocket more often! Editor's Note: If you wish to review previous Domain Sales columns, they are available in our Archive. |
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Copyright 2003
Domain Name Journal
A Division of
Internet Edge, Inc.