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Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

This guy is really committed to the joke, seeing as how he could easily sell bar.com for millions of dollars.

Note also that there is a .bar gTLD, and there is a foo.bar domain as of 2014 (though it doesn't seem to be hosting any content). I run the .foo gTLD, and bar.foo is a real domain (though admittedly not as good as foo.bar). There is no .baz; next round maybe?

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The domain is for sale for the right price: https://www.haven2.com/index.php/domains

Seems the asking price is at least 1m USD

Nice find. Guy has a serious portfolio of good .coms and knows what they're worth, and is holding out until he gets the right offer.

Does he ever get a good offer? It seems to be the case that all the biggest websites are not on "good names" but that they took meaningless words and make them good names.

hotels.com? uber.com? stamps.com? There's lots of really big businesses built around single word domains. Not every single one of them of course, but definitely enough for good domains to be immensely valuable.

Yes, but did they sell for $1 million? Or did these "premium" domains sell for something more realistic?

An asking offer without a bid is just that - an offer. I can ask $1M for that red apple sitting on my desk. It's completely irrelevant.

PS. This behavior is quite prominent in real estate prices, they're so slow to fall down. For example the US real estate market bottomed only in 2011. You have to be very patient if you want to buy the dip in such "I will only sell for the right price!!" markets.

Real estate isn't a great example because the carrying costs of unsold property in the form of upkeep, property taxes, mortgage, insurance, etc., are non-trivial. In general it's not remotely reasonable to hold onto property for 20 years without selling it. By contrast, the holding cost on a domain name is effectively zero, so there's much less pressure to get rid of one quickly. Plus, seeing as how the prices have only continued climbing over time, people who held out earlier and then got a good deal more recently don't regret it.

If I had a good portfolio of potential $1M+ domain names I too would hold onto them and wait for the right buyer to come along. I'm in no desperate need of money right now.

And yet people do it in real estate.

You'd be surprised. Not going to name anyone in particular but I know of multiple major one word domains that have been bought for that order of magnitude (some more, some less). For certain companies, that's chump change compared to the additional traffic a good domain name will bring their business.

They sold for quite a bit more than $1M, in fact. I would argue that the actual sales are realistic (in the sense that they reflect the actual price that people are willing to pay for them, i.e. their actual value), and it's merely your expectations that are unrealistic. You are significantly underestimating how valuable a good one-word keyword is in a single globally unified namespace used by billions of people daily. For companies worth many billions of dollars (most of the below), a few million on a killer domain name is nothing.

Here are some notable expensive domain name sales:

    Uber.com     2% of the company's equity in 2010 (!!)
    Sex.com      $13M
    Hotels.com   $11M
    Tesla.com    $11M
    Porn.com     $9.5M
    Fb.com       $8.5M

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_domain_...

Whoever owned Uber.com was a smart business person and/or a tough negotiator. That’s brilliant. Thanks for the examples.

Note it also lists LasVegas.com for $90 million (in instalments) from 2005.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2018/08/07/ex...

He says, that one of the domains he already sold, was "corp.com". A few comments above we can read, that it was up for auction, starting at 1.7million and Microsoft bought it in the last few weeks.

In fact, he quite recently sold corp.com for a healthy sum: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/04/microsoft-buys-corp-com-...

bar.foo redirects to careers.google.com. Nice joke. ;)

Yeah, it used to be a programming problem challenge website feeding into recruiting efforts. It was turned down though after living out its useful life and now it's just a redirect.

I believe the actual foobar challenge site is still running.

You got a link? Because I'm pretty sure it was running on the bar.foo domain.

https://foobar.withgoogle.com/

Thanks. bar.foo should really be redirecting there ... I'll look into it.

I was once reading some documentation (I think for GCP) and there was a weird artifact in the corner of the page, it moved a bit when I moused over it (??) and when I clicked it I got redirected to this site (using the .withgoogle.com TLD).

The element never reappeared again.

I always wondered why the element appeared on the page. Obviously because "some combination of factors" ultimately returned true - I mean specifically why :)

I got something like that once but my ad blocker apparently screwed up the functionality and I never saw one again.

Haha, I have seen it three times but the opening of the black box is so slow I have always clicked something by then.

How does one get to run a TLD?

Through ICANN: https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/about/program

form a company with enough money behind it, google "donuts llc"

then pay a lot of money to ICANN

I don’t think anyone is paying millions of dollars for domains any more. Maybe low six figures.

Domain names are going for more money than ever before. The record for most expensive sale (publicly known anyway) was hit just last year. 30 million dollars for voice.com: https://domainnamewire.com/2019/06/20/yes-voice-com-is-the-m...

it's counterintuitive, with the flora of TLDs

A lot of people assume .com for whatever reason

Every single tab I have open is on .com right now. Other tlds seem to only be used by blogs or small single page sites like .io games.

I looked at my tabs. There's a lot of .orgs and some random country domain, one git site hosted on .ht and lots of national news and other sites on my local ccTLD.

And mastodon instances are rather new, and exist on a massive amount of different tlds, of course on .social but also others. Probably the age of the service plays a big role! We'll see more TLD diversity as things get much older.

This is a fun experiment. What I came up with:

com org uk gov blog us nyc io to edu

(I do have a lot of tabs.)

The new gTLDs have been great for random people like you and me just wanting a domain to actually use it, but terrible for domainers. I got a nice 4-letter domain (cyde.dev, which I haven't done anything with yet) that I never in a million years would've gotten on .com.

Only if you happen to have one someone really really wants. You can find 3 and 4 letter .coms publicly listed for six figures.

If Facebook was still The Facebook and for some reason hadn't thought to pick up facebook.com before now, the price on that would be only just bounded.

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