Iraq.com Domain Name Being Auctioned
The domain name Iraq.com is being auctioned off at Sedo, where the bidding has reached 450,000 Euros, or about $632,215 in U.S. dollars. The bidding started last Thursday at 2,000 Euros and has risen steadily, but has not yet reached the reserve price. The auction is scheduled to conclude Thursday at 2 p.m. EST. Sedo's auction process typically begins once an initial offer has been made on a domain placed for sale with the service. That offer then becomes the opening bid.
WHOIS records list the owner of Iraq.com as KuwaitNet Internet Services, which registered the name in May 1997. The company offers managed hosting and dedicated servers, and is also an ICANN-accredited registrar.
Given the intense debate about the ongoing U.S. war in Iraq, there might be any number of parties with an interest in acquiring the domain. The (apparently) interim Iraqi government web site appears to be at iraqigovernment.org while the U.S. Embassy uses iraq.usembassy.gov. In Aug. 2005 ICANN authorized the fledgling Iraqi government to manage .iq, the top-level domain for the country, which had been in limbo since the previous operators (InfoCom Corp.) were indicted in 2002.
Posted by RichM 
September 24, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter
June 21, 2006
Would You Pay $29K for CondoleezaRice.com?
The Hill has an excellent analysis of domain names tied to the 2008 presidential campaign, which have been targeted by speculators. "Many of the political domain names have been bought as investments with the intention of being sold to the potential presidential campaigns," notes The Hill's Kelly McCormack. "Other buyers acquired the Web addresses to post endorsements or bash the presidential hopefuls. Either way, the cyberbrigade has hit almost all the presidential hopefuls."
A bunch of 2008-related names are being for sale through a Blogger site titled Political Domain World, which touts names including condoleezzarice08.com and johnmccain08.net.
Posted by RichM June 21, 2006 | Permalink | Newsletter
June 14, 2006
What's a Blog Domain Worth? Plenty, It Seems
What's a domain worth? It's difficult to sort out the value of a particular name, and appraisals are often not much help (more on this another time). But a new site called DN Sale Price (link via Domain Editorial) is useful in identifying comparable sales. The site is aggregated from a database of domain sales that have been listed on exchanges or published by sources like Domain Name Journal. You can research sales by keyword and top-level domain.
So what's a blog-related domain worth? Plenty, in some cases. A search on "blog" finds the $400,000 sale of myblog.com, but also a handful of five-digit sales and a bunch of four-digit sales. Sales exceeding $10,000 included VideoBlog.com ($21,000), WebBlog.com ($14,055) and MobileBlog.com ($10,120). Another 17 sales are listed where a blog-related domain sold for between $2,000 and $10,000, including BlogSport.com ($8,946), WirelessBlog ($3,500) and Blogwatch ($3,150).
Posted by RichM June 14, 2006 | Permalink | Newsletter
May 11, 2006
Diamond.com Sells for $7.5 Million
Odimo Incorporated said Wednesday that it had sold the domain name diamond.com for $7.5 million to online retailer Ice.com, making the deal one of the biggest domain sales of all time. Odimo's diamond and jewelry inventory and corporate packaging were sold to Ice.com for an additional $2.0 million, as the parties appear to have separated the sale of the domain and parts of the underlying business, a distinction that has been an issue in other recent big-ticket sales.
The Diamond.com sale price equals the $7.5 million paid for Business.com in 1999, which was recognized for many years as the highest domain sale of all time. In January Sex.com was sold for a higher price, with various reports placing the sale price at $14 million. However, the sale included an adult web site and underlying business, in addition to the domain. Some domainers - including Marc Ostrofsky, the seller in the record Business.com sale - say that because the Sex.com price included a business as well as a domain, it's an apples-to-oranges comparison.
Posted by RichM May 11, 2006 | Permalink | Newsletter
April 14, 2006
USA Today: Domains are Red-hot Again
"Internet domains are red-hot again." That's the verdict from USA Today in an April 13 article by Jon Swartz noting that 15 domains have resold for at least six figures this year. It also cites the recent Zetetic research that notes that 1,949 names have sold for $14.2 million in the first quarter of 2006, compared to 5,851 sales netting $29 million in all of 2005 .
Posted by RichM April 14, 2006 | Permalink | Newsletter
December 22, 2005
Blog-related Domains Fetch Huge Premiums
Blog-related domain names are hot these days. Last week it was announced that Blogster.com had sold for $100,000, confirming the value of blogging domains in the wake of the surprising sale of MyBlog.com for $400,000. These prices appear to be driven by recent deals in which blog-related businesses have sold for surprising prices, including the AOL's purchase of Weblogs Inc. and VeriSign's deal for Dave Winer's blogs.com ping service. As blogging matures as a revenue-generating business, folks with money are starting to notice and step in with significant offers. Will this trend continue? I'm not a completely disinterested bystander, as I have Blogworks.net for sale at the moment.
Posted by RichM December 22, 2005 | Permalink | Newsletter
September 28, 2005
IGE Buys EQ.com for $100,000
Virtual market maker IGE recently paid $100,000 to purchase the domain name eq.com, which now takes visitors to a page on the IGE site offering the sale of online currency and accounts for Everquest, the popular Sony Entertainment MMORPG (massively multiplayer online roleplaying game). The eq.com domain was previously owned by Laserlight Publishing, which marketed a book called The EQ Factor (Entrepreneurial Quotient), according to Domain Name Wire.
Posted by RichM September 28, 2005 | Permalink | Newsletter
August 23, 2005
Invention.com up to $650K on eBay
The domain name Invention.com is for sale on eBay, with a listed price of $650,100 with 13 hours remaining in the auction. It's hard to know whether this price will materialize, as all the bidding past $330,000 has been between a new bidder and one with two feedbacks. Nonetheless, there's been plenty of action, with 40 bids. If there's any serious last-minute sniping, the price could approach this year's top domain name sale of $750K (for website.com and property.com).
The seller, Tihan Seale, says in the listing that he has owned the domain for 79 days and it is averaging more than $5,000 a month in revenue from Overture ads. The previous owner was intellectual property attorney Michael Kroll, who continues to do business at invention.net (always register the additional TLDs for your brand!). The previous sale isn't listed among Domain Name Journal's top sales of 2005, so there's no way to know how much Seale figure to clear if the sale price holds up (i.e. the buyers have the money to back these huge bids).
Posted by RichM August 23, 2005 | Permalink | Newsletter
May 9, 2005
Gambling.com Owner Sells for $19.8 Million
The owner of the gambling.com domain and web portal has sold for $19.8 million (10.5 million UK pounds). Newbold Enterprises Ltd. has been bought by the British firm Gaming Corporation, which owns casino.co.uk and findpoker.co.uk. Those sites, like gambling.com, direct Internet searchers seeking online gaming sites in return for referral commissions. Gambling.com currently comes up first in a Google search for "gambling," which combined with the extraordinary growth in Internet gambling helps explain the sale price.
While the URL and its considerable Googlejuice is clearly a major factor in the value of the deal, the transaction isn't a pure-play domain sale, and thus doesn't top the all-time priciest domain sale, the 1999 sale of business.com for $7.5 million. Casinomeister reports that the deal will result in a sizable profit for Newbold.
"This acquisition is a major step in the evolution of Gaming Corporation," said Justin Drummond, Gaming Corporation Chief Executive, "Gambling.com is the leading global online gaming search brand and a very profitable and fast growing business. This acquisition forms part of Gaming Corporation's strategy of building a portfolio of gaming brands that attract a worldwide audience."
Posted by RichM May 9, 2005 | Permalink | Newsletter
E-Commerce Times summarizes the booming activity in the domain resale market, including some aggregated numbers of sales volume and pricing:
The volume of domain name transactions in 2004 was up 300 percent from 2003. Consolidated data from DNJournal, Domain-Spiegel.de and Sedo.com, three leading independent companies tracking the domain name marketplace, shows the average sale price of dot-com domains is more than US$9,700.That includes a noticeable pickup in sales in .TLDs beyond .com and .net. The number of .info sales soared from 27 reported sales and a total volume of $68,571 in 2003, to 149 reported sales and a total volume of $367,045 in 2004, while transactions for .biz and .us also grew.
Posted by RichM May 9, 2005 | Permalink | Newsletter
May 8, 2005
Report: Google Pays $1 Million for google.cn.com
There are reports via the Search Engine Watch message boards and SEO Roundtable that Google has paid a whopping $1 million to acquire google.com.cn and google.cn. A whois search shows that Google indeed owns both google.cn and google.com.cn, but the listings don't provide any information on when the registrant of record was last changed. There reportedly is widespread coverage of this in China, but not in any English-language media as yet.
Posted by RichM May 8, 2005 | Permalink | Newsletter