Readings for February 7th, 2008
In the mid-1990s, "lone rangers" lassoed many of the great generic
Web addresses and ruled the secondhand market for years, says Jackson.
Small companies, often built around one guy, would amass thousands of
domains. They were a seclusive bunch, happy to hoard domain names
quietly and sell only when the price was right.Most of the venture capital at the time went to Web companies. But when the dotcom bubble burst in 2001, websites that were
once valued at millions of dollars became worthless. Yet Web addresses retained much of their value.
"Beachfront
property is still beachfront property, regardless of what house or
store sits on top of it," says Rob Sequin, who entered the market in
1999 and now owns about 1,500 Web addresses. "And the beauty of domains
is that you don't need to paint them, or maintain them, or pay taxes on
them."
By 2003, Web address sales once again broke $1 million. Mr. Sequin says that's the first year he could consider domain trading
to be a full-time job.
This time, major investors started paying attention.
Source:
The Christian Science Monitor
Pool sold Shoppers.com for over $166,000 this week, but the name should have been exclusive to NameJet.
[Updated 10:24 CST] Pool.com landed a whale this week, catching
Shoppers.com and selling it for $166,000 through its auction. Although
the value of the domain is debatable,
the bigger question is how Pool landed the domain since it was
registered at Network Solutions, which has an exclusive relationship
with NameJet for expired domains.
One rumor was that the domain was deleted due to invalid whois
information. That isn't true. The domain had a private registration at
Network Solutions until late last year, when its email changed to
novaildemail@verisign.com [sic, notice the wrong spelling of
valid.] This suggests that the domain had incorrect whois information.
However, the domain had an expiration date of October 28, 2007, so the
domain did expire.
Source:
Domain Name Wire
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