Color.com Was Acquired For $350,000 (The Domain Name, That Is) | Hacker News Reader

Color.com Was Acquired For $350,000 (The Domain Name, That Is)

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43 pointsshawndumas33 comments

$350,000 actually seems like a good value for that domain name when you consider how memorable / brandable it is.

I've bought a couple of 5 figure domain names for marketing projects and if you're building around PR / word of mouth or direct response (tv / radio) marketing a great domain is worth its weight in gold.

Smart move IMO and you can see the list of top 10 sales in 2010 here to compare value wise where it fell . . .

1. Sex.com $13,000,000 Sedo 11/17/10

2. Slots.com $5,500,000 Moniker/SnapNames 6/2/10

3. Dating.com $1,750,000 Moniker/SnapNames DOMAINfest FTL 6/16/10

4. Photo.com $1,250,000 Moniker/SnapNames 5/5/10

5. Flying.com $1,100,000 Pvt Sale 4/7/10 6. Zip.com $1,058,830 Moniker/SnapNames/ DOMAINfest Europe 10/27/10

7. Poker.org $1,000,000 Sedo 2/23/10

8. Credit.fr €587,500 =$851,875 Sedo 1/12/10

9. Guns.com $800,000 Moniker/SnapNames 3/10/10

10. Ringtones.com $750,000 Sedo 12/15/10

21. Color.com $350,000 GoDaddy Auctions 12/8/10

via http://dnjournal.com/archive/domainsales/2010/2010-final-ytd...

Upvoted for hard data. Strange, though, that out of the most valuable 10 domain names, I don't recognize any as being at the top of their industry. I wonder if they got their money's worth.

At least it's a fungible asset unlikely to depreciate. You'd have to do extraordinarily awful as a business to significantly lower the value of your domain name.

I have doubts about their long-term value. People enter actual urls less and less, eventually I can see the browsers ditching them completely (from the presentation layer), and then you might struggle to find anyone paying millions for .coms. Likewise the marketability of a 'dotcom' brand might fade like tech terms often do (remember when everyone used to boast about having 'CD-ROMs').

I thought a lot of the value came from SEO. I just googled "sex" and sex.com didn't come up at all. That could be because they have a link page up instead of any content. Googling "slots" at least brought up slots.com 6th.

In terms of being top of their industry, I would think that spending this kind of money on a domain would be accompanied by the conscious or subconscious thought that since we have such an amazing domain, we'll coast and let the traffic/money come in, vs. obscure domains/company names who have to earn traffic by proving their value.

The secret is these were not all cash sales.

Many times it's an "equivalent stock swap" which is bogus.

They publish large numbers for the publicity, old trick.

With "color" they probably had to pay cash, so it's a real sale.

As someone with a company that has purchased 6 and 7 figure domain names, I wonder why you make this assumption. All our deals were for cash, and I have no reason to believe these listed deals were otherwise.

Do you have any citations?

Mint did a six figure stock swap in their Series A in exchange for the domain. See: http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-story-behind-Mint-coms-deal...

The choice of highly brandable names like sex or color come with a huge disadvantage in terms of SEO. I mean, just try searching for the Color app on the app store, you have thousands and thousands of apps with "color" showing up. Sometimes it is best to go with something unique. IMO.

Good points about the domain name being an asset of the company. They should get Mark Cuban on their board, he could sell that domain to Yahoo for billions.

I was genuinely amazed that pantone didn't own the domain.

The name is so generic that when I saw the earlier HN thread ("Color now available on Android Market") I had no idea what they were talking about--maybe the descriptive text for an app could be in HTML?

Personally, I think that it is unfortunate that the $41M investment has made Color everyone's favorite punching bag. Right now, three of the top 15 HN threads seem to be focused on Color

Sequoia had made an investment based (on among other things) what they consider to be a very strong founding team.

If they are right and if this investment has a high ROI, great for Color and for Sequoia.

If they are wrong, this investment will be a money-loser (like most other VC investments out there). In the meanwhile, I do wish that people stop beating up on Color.

Early reviews in the android market are not looking so good.

They linked to jaquesm's blog. Good for him.

I linked because dude is awesome :)

As someone who isn’t good at SEO, is the name and domain going to be good or bad for the company?

I tried to find the app on the iTunes search result list and gave up (until I found a direct link).

i don't think this name is good for SEO since it's such a generic term; but it really shouldn't matter given the amount of money they have, and being a primarily mobile app. they're coming up 10th for "color" right now, while it's cool to be able to say color.com, does it really matter? i don't think so- think they didn't need to spend close to half a mil on color+colour rather than going with something like getcolor.com or colorapp.com

the itunes placement seems like a wiser place to spend their money at this point, but really with $41MM i guess they can spend it everywhere all at once if they like.

I agree they would have got more brand for the buck with these domains, they can still buy them up, they have the money, and keeps it out of the hands of others.

Same in the Android Market.

My criteria for deciding to get a top tier domain:

1) It doesn't eat into your runway.

2) It can later be sold at roughly the same price or better.

They easily hit #1 and #2 is likely. Smart move.

$350,000 is a lot for a 5 letter domain name (says owner of fab.com) ;-)

Was your offer unsolicited? I would guess that an unsolicited offer for a poorly performing site would lead to some good deals on domains.

From one of you prev posts, it sounds like fab.com was a social network that didn't take off.

I bought fab.com from a domain hoarder in 2010. It had been unused for many years prior. The fab.com social network was run by us after purchasing the domain. We ran the SN under that name for a few months before deciding to change courses using the same domain name.

Are you willing to disclose a price range Jason?

I'm guessing, looking at your level of funding when you bought it, that you got a better deal than color/colour.com for a better, more brandable name

What else will you do with $41M? Throw around at domains and @usernames

I own the curio.us domain hack. I was going to start a small site on it but if someone offered me that much I'd really have to think about selling.

spends like this one make me think that we could be in a bubble.

why? when fred wilson talks about saving a few thousand dollars, these guys go out and blow a fraction of million! i mean think up something like instagram.

especially when something as memorable as fireblot.com is still available for $10

They also acquired colour.com, which must have been near the $50K range.

Actually from what I can gather it was between $80k and $120k, haven't been able to pin it down though.

This is a killer name and quite cheap IMO.

Who did they buy this from and what was up on color.com prior?

All of a sudden color.me is worth a million bucks.

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