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Comment by mirciulica | Hacker News Reader

On the one hand it is harder and harder to find a decent dot com domain name, on the other hand I see some crazy prices that make absolutely no sense. Even if you choose to buy a name on the second market why pay these ridiculous prices?

https://www.healthinsurance.com sold for over 8M bucks, is the difference between this name and something like https://insurancemavens.com (for sale @ $395) worth 8 million?

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It depends on the marketing budget. If you're spending $100+ million / year on advertising, paying a few million dollars for a domain may make sense if you're plastering it all over other print and digital media.

You have to think of it in the context of how much money some companies spend. DigiCert sells a "Secure Site Wildcard" (non-EV) SSL certificate for $2k / year. If companies are willing to pay $2k / year for something that advertises their stupidity...

Healthinsurance.com sounds super fishy to me and I would be hesitant to do business with a company that hides who they are. My expectation is that a company's domain is the name. So unless it is "Health Inusrance, Inc.", this seems shady.

It comes with the expectation that the average user is dumb enough to think that by going on a "premium domain name" that it, therefor, makes the product better and marketability even more attractive.

It's stupid.

Yet it works, because someone's grandma will always type healthinsurance.com and get phished before they find the actual website for medicaid.

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