These days, you can get a .com domain name for as little as $9.99. But if you’ve already registered a domain and a brand wants it, it can be worth millions.
One thing is for sure – big brands are willing to pay big bucks to snap up internet real estate if it suits their needs.
If you sell shoes, wouldn’t you want to get your hands on shoes.com, even if you’d just be using it to direct your visitors to your main website?
Of course you would and you’d probably also be willing to go to great lengths to make it yours.
So here are the top 10 most expensive domains ever sold:
1. Insure.com
Insure.com is the most expensive domain name ever sold, having been bought for $16M by Quin Street in 2009. “We have sold our Insure.com name and specified website content in a significant cash transaction that we think is in the best long-term interest of our shareholders,” said Robert Bland, CEO of Insure.com.
2. Sex.com
Sex.com is second on the list, having been sold in 2006 for $13M which saw it break into the Guinness Book of World Records in the High Price Paid for a Domain category. In October 2010 it sold again, this time for $14M.
3. Fund.com 2008
Fund.com was sold privately and at $9.9m it was the highest cash price sale ever reporter, having been paid for in an all-cash transaction.
And it wasn’t a one-off – writing at the time Ron Jackson of DN Journal said: “With the highest sale on record, another three sales in the six-figure range and 44 sales reaching at least five figures this was a pretty darn good week for domains.”
The fact the economy was supposedly on the skids at the time made the high volume of transactions even more impressive.
4. Porn.com 2007
The adult industry’s top domain name – porn.com – sold for $9.5M in 2007 to MXN Limited. Given the success of sex.com, it’s slightly surprising it didn’t go for even more.
5. Fb.com
Facebook bought Fb.com for $8.5M in November 2010 from the American Farm Bureau Federation, which is 42 times the amount the company originally paid for Facebook.com. “The Farm Bureau agreed to sell us fb.com and we in return have agreed not to sell farm subsidies,” Zuckerberg said in a post on techcrunch.com.
6. Business.com 1999
Another big sale was for business.com that was sold in 1999 for $7.5M. The domain was initially registered by two friends who wanted to use it to create their own B2B site. Then they sold it for 46 times what they originally paid. How’s that for a profit?
7. Diamond.com
If you’re selling jewellery online, diamond.com is one of the most desirable domain names, which is why it changed hands for $7.5M for back in 2006.
8. Beer.com
It’s understandable that Interbrew would want to own beer.com, which was originally used as a review site where people could go and rate their favourite beers. In 2004, Interbrew stepped in and bought it for $7 million. However, rumours are that Interbrew actually paid the beer.com owners in stock, rather than cash.
9. Israel.com
There’s no information on who actually bought Israel.com for $5.88 million in 2008. However, the seller, Joel Noel Friedman, became a celebrity when he revealed he decided to sell the domain to celebrate Israel’s 60th anniversary.
10. Casino.com
Casino.com is the 10th most expensive domain name ever sold and it’s now owned by a company in Gibraltar that paid $5.5 million for it in 2003.
So there you have it – ten domain names which netted their respective owners a fortune. Maybe yours could be next.
Guest post by Alex Gavril of 123-reg.co.uk, the UK’s largest domain name provider.