Sales of domains Fly.com, Russia.com, America.com and Brazil.com were among the top ten highest valued URLs in 2009 as travel and geography-related sites showed a rise in popularity with buyers.
Data from domain marketplace specialist Sedo shows that the well publicised purchase of Fly.com by Travelzoo just weeks ahead of the metasearch engine’s launch in February 2009 was the biggest transaction of the year at £1.2 million (almost $1.8 million at today’s prices).
Russia.com was also another high-ticket item, going for over £900,000 ($1.4 million).
Sedo says there is a general increase in geographic and travel-related domains changing hands, with Sudan.com (£75,295) and Kiev.com (£54,601) also appearing high in quarterly tables in the later part of 2009.
Sedo business development director Nora Nanayakkara says:
“The findings suggest that marketers are looking to capitalise on the benefits that geographic domains offer. Search engines like Google put significant weight on the keywords within domain names, so having a geographic domain name that incorporates a place name can take a website right to the top of search engine rankings.â€
Despite the high value sales, all except Fly.com appear to be dormant, at least as travel-related websites (all three have GoDaddy branding and affiliate links).
The ten most expensive global domain sales in 2009:
- Fly.com – £1,152,173.24
- Russia.com – £904,319.74
- Call.com – £678,749.65
- Server.com – £478,143.83
- America.com – £474,977.28
- Files.com – £449,845.74
- Christian.com – £366,917.29
- Top.com – £327,916.88
- Talk.com – £303,994.08
- Brazil.com – £302,489.98
Related posts:
DN Journal is a good source for reported domain sales -
http://www.dnjournal.com/archive/domainsales/2009/ytd-sales-charts-2009.htm
Most notable additional Geo’s are Rio.com, Sudan.com and Russia.eu
Seeriese.de (“cruise” in German) was another notable travel sale.
Geo domain names like cities and states are the proverbial Boardwalk and Park Place of the internet. Web addresses that contain a city location are logical choices for various businesses that work in and around a particular city. The possibilities are close to limitless for geodomains.
“Geographic” related names might have fetched some big bucks last year, but “earth” related names number in the thousands. I’m not getting the response to earth2.info that I thought I’d get. Still seems like a good investment to me. Not many people interested in sweat equity theses days either.
I bought a number of geographic .me domain names, but not really sure of their value. I believe korea.me sold for USD70,000 (not mine), but sedo values wales.me, belarus.me, cambodia.me, niger.me, benin.me and libya.me at under USD500 in their automated valuation… what kind of price should I be looking for realistically?
M. Key,
The safest valuation is to discount the net revenue stream. If the interest rate is 3% and, a revenue stream, i.e. domain name yields $30 per year, it is worth $1000. However, comparing domain names to certificates of deposits is not what you or I are interested in.
The big money uses of the internet is probably still pornography, so if you can sell the names to that kind of business, you might get lots of “value.” Otherwise, you have to control a significant share of the symilar names. Do a “whois” search on similar names to the ones you’r interested in. There will probably be a lot.
We, my fledgling sweat equity start-up own earth2.info at $39 registration fee, plus some time emailing around. An appraisal firm quoted earth.org at $13k. I decided that a “tag-on” would be okay since they had announced that they were quitting.
Also evaluate the liabilities. Are there people mad at the name? Have they done anything wrong? Themes on “Toyota-Safety” for example might not be valued the same since the “sticky” throttle pedal came up. Such names might be valuable to class action “King of Torts” type lawyers?
Domain name valuation is for people who don’t find commodity futures exciting enough.
mydnstats.com gives an approximate value.
Best of good fortunes for you, Cactusmitch:)
Good words here. I don’t know why but this gave me the motivation to keep up the hard work.