|
        |
||
| ||
Miss.com Scores A Direct Hit in $35,000 Sale at Afternic!
It doesn't look like anything can hold this market down. This past week was
broken up by a long holiday weekend in the United States. America's Independence
Day celebration fell on a Sunday (July 4) prompting many businesses to take
a four-day break from Friday through Monday. Even with that hiatus taking a
hunk out of the calendar, the hits just kept on coming! Actually in the case
of this week's #1 domain it was a miss that hit the mark with Miss.com going
for $35,000 at Afternic.com.
That sale was just one of five reported five-figure deals with a couple of others just a few hundred dollars below that mark. The steady rise in new extensions continued as well with six four-figure deals reported and another less than $50 under that benchmark. Even so, .com called the shots this week, taking 9 of the 10 slots on our new mainstream chart. The world's most popular extension has come within an eyelash of sweeping the Top Ten in the past but hasn't quite cleared that hurdle yet. To be fair though, if all domain sales were reported, .com would have scored several sweeps by now. The sales that are made public give all of us a good indicator of where the market is going but the majority change hands in confidential transactions.
 |
You'll recall this week's #2 domain from a mention in our Pipeline section last week. PartyPocker.com, a high traffic misspelling of party poker, raked in a $26,500 pot when the sale was finalized at Pool.com. The domain scores 362 with the extension at Overture. With Overture's top advertiser bid for "poker" standing at 41 cents it still looks like it will take a good while to recoup that investment, but it's a pretty good bet poker will never go out of style so time is on the new owner's side.
Enom's Club Drop is starting to make some noise. The expiring domains auction service scored it's first Top Ten two-bagger this week, hitting #3 with Ambient.com at $22,000 and #8 with FastPitch.com at $8,100. Club Drop used to be reserved for Enom resellers but has just been opened to anyone with an Enom account. Club Drop author Christopher Ambler will be the subject of our August cover story. He'll help us give you an inside look at the drop process that few people have seen before.
GreatDomains is back this week with the #4 domain, Cursors.com at $12,500. They've had a lot of activity in recent days that should produce some other notable sales once the deals are finalized. If someone was going to prevent a .com sweep, you just knew it would be Sedo.com. It's a rare week indeed when they fail to place a country code domain on our Top Ten. They did it again this week, landing the #5 position with Salon.co.uk at $11,055. That was one of three domains Sedo placed on the big board.
At $9,569, Mova .com just missed the five-figure mark. Looks like poker was the theme of the week with Sedo's PokerMillionaire.com going for $9,201 to place 7th. After Club Drop's second entry, Pool stepped in to run the rest of the table. #9 domain DrakeHotel.com looks like a nice buy at $7,700. It's one of the more common hotel names in the world and packs an added traffic bonus (203 with the extension in Overture). We actually had 11 domains in the Top Ten this week since Pool shoehorned a pair into the 10th slot; PatentOffice.com and BackstagePass.com each went $6,100.
You might recall BackstagePass.com from a previous mention in the Pipeline. Another of those sales was finalized at Pool this week, a $5,600 deal for FashionForum.com. When you check the WhoIs records to see who ends up with these domains you usually see some familiar faces. That was the case with FashionForum.com which went to Thunayan K. AL-Ghanim (Elequa). Pool's other winners included FHSAA.com and FreeStar.com at $4,100 each. FHSAA.com scores a whopping 1,056 with the extension in Overture. Being based in Florida we are very familiar with the acronym which stands for Florida High School Activities Association. They regulate all high school sports in the state of Florida and have their own site on FHSAA.org. This is a startling example of how much traffic even a well-known non-.com domain loses to its .com counterpart.
Also at Pool, we saw Cruisepath.com glide in with $3,600 and 3-letter CJF.com go for $3,300. A pair of geographical domains also topped the 3K mark: Morrisville.com at $3,320 and Orangeburg.com at $3,101. CatholicMass.com returned a heavenly $2,700 while SofaCovers.com soaked up a tidy $2,272. GoToMyComputer.com commanded $2,250 and Netspot.com was in the right place to catch $2,250. Others over 2K were AtWork.com which sold for $2,100, FunyJunk.com (2,890 in OT with the extension!) at $2,050 and StreetRaceing.com (317 with the extension) at $2,025. The latter two are misspells that obviously attract a lot of visitors. Pool's best .net sale was tabloid.net at $1,650.
 |
Sedo also racked up a long list of nice sales between $3,000-$5,000. A new TLD domain, Erotica.info, was the best of those, going for €4,000 ($4,918). That was good enough to place that name at the top of our new extension chart. Lottoziehung.de (German for "lottery drawing") drew €3,950 ($4,856), Kurzreise.com ("short trip") added $3,688 and ComputerService.net went for €2,888 ($3,550). Another German country code domain, MailOrder.de, sold for €2,500 ($3,074), the same amount fetched by Digiarts.com. Two others hit $3,000 even; Green-Card.com and ProWein.com (German for "pro wine"). Sedo also had a superb week with new TLD domains as you'll see in a few moments.
At Afternic, SoulDates.com enjoyed a $4,499 night out. AgentDirectory.com added $3,688 and ProspectLeads.com generated a $3,200 sale. Just as pure domain sales are enjoying a big rebound, domain based businesses are also going for increasingly higher amounts. The big one this past week saw LastMinute.com buy out Germany's LastMinute.de in a deal worth €46.7 million ($57.4 million) in cash and stock.
In the Pipeline: PaintballGun.com, mentioned in this section last week, is still waiting for payment at Pool. The auction for that domain ended at $21,830.
Miss.com moves onto our Year-To-Date Top 40 chart in a tie for #28. The $35,000 domain knocked 3 misspellings of download.com off the lower rungs of the chart and raised the entry fee to $27,000.
This was an excellent week for the rapidly growing new extensions. Six of the seven domains on our Super 7 chart went in four figures with the last one just missing the mark by $47! All three new TLD's, .info, .biz and .us were represented on the new list though .info, as usual, took home the lion's share of the money. As we noted earlier, Erotica.info led the way after going for $4,918 at Sedo (which had 5 of the 7 charted sales).
#2 domain TopTen.info sold for a solid $3,378. My first job was as a teenage (me, not the audience!) radio DJ so I have always loved domains like this. I have Top20.info and Top40.biz myself, so it's nice to others share the same appreciation I have for these names.
.Biz nailed down the #3 position with Branchen.biz going for $3,071. That's the German word for "industries" so it is a perfect match for the extension. I saw some interesting statistics this week that showed Germans have registered three times more .info domains than .biz. However Americans have shown a slight preference for .biz over .info, registering about 577,000 .biz compared to 503,000 .info. There are links to those stats near the end of our Lowdown section if you would like to read more on how registrations break down by country.
The #4 domain is Industrial.info at $2,400. That has been in escrow at Afternic the past few weeks but the deal is done now. If you need any more evidence that new TLD's are coming of age, check out the number 5 domain - it has not one but two hyphens and still went for four figures! Normally that would be the kiss of death for any extension but it didn't keep Made-in-Germany.info from going for $1,216! Here is a look at the complete Super 7 for the past week:
Gregory Williamson of DandyDomain.com was the buyer of the #6 domain, Satellite.info, acquired in a private transaction for $1,000. He has pointed it to a satellite TV affiliate site for the time being while he decides whether to develop or resell the domain. Another reader, Michael Zielinski, picked up the #7 domain, Opportunity.us at Sedo for $953. Zielinski has been very active in .US space in recent weeks.
There were at least a half dozen other decent sales reported to us this week. At Sedo, Yugioh.biz (a wildly popular trading card game) went for €666 ($819) and Consumers.biz sold for $700. Howard Hoffman of PPCIncome.com also collected $700 for Milena.biz, a very nice price considering it is a European female first name in the .biz extension. Back at Sedo, Golfplaetze.info (German for "golf courses") sold for €550 ($675), Staat.info ("state") went for €550 ($675) and Apeldoorn.info (a city in the Netherlands) sold for the same amount.
Erotica.info takes up residence in our Year-To-Date New TLD Top 25 after that $4,918 sale at Sedo. That was good enough for the #21 position.
Source : http://www.dnjournal.com/
