Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

$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 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.

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...

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