Stephane Van Gelder - Domain market

Jobs.ca, Canada's record sale

stephane.vangelder@indom.com (Stephane Van Gelder) — Tue, 06 May 2008 17:08:21 +0200

Confirming the current trend for bigger and bigger sales of ccTLD domains, Internet real-estate developer Ogopogo Media has confirmed its 600,000 USD purchase of jobs.ca.

The name will become the core "of a planned job network, which will include JobSearch.ca and Resumes.ca that will cover all the needs of both job seekers and employers," claims the buyer.

This sale sets a new record for Canada's extension. It also provides clear confirmation (if any was needed) of the growing interest in ccTLDs. Investors are flocking to country codes for obvious reasons. The suffixes are less crowded that generics like .COM, giving them better chances of finding names that are still available. Furthermore, those names that are already taken tend to be cheaper to buy.

At INDOM, we're getting more and more volume buyers coming to us for ccTLDs. Their logic is sound. 600,000 might sound like a lot, but when you compare the sale price of .CA's most expensive domain ever to that of the record-setting .COM domains, there's obviously still a lot of potential left in going national rather than international for your choice of suffixes.

Selling bond!

stephane.vangelder@indom.com (Stephane Van Gelder) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:23:42 +0200

Times are hard for Her Majesty's favourite spy. Not only has his Aston Martin just been crashed, but now his name is for sale on the Internet!

This week's high profile domain name auction (seems like there's one every single week at the moment) is bond.com. The name has 2 days left to run on its auction and currently stands at 70,000 USD. The name's current owner obviously thinks it's worth a lot more, as there's talk of a reserve set at 1 million USD for this sale!

Poor Bond. Not only has an Aston Martin engineer just wrecked his almost unique (the car maker has prepped 5 ultra special cars for the new Bond movie, Quantum of Solace) car by plunging it into an Italian lake but now his name is up for sale. Of course, the domain bond.com could just as well refer to the famous London street or to the ties that two people might share. And it remains to be seen if domain investors will consider it as valuable as recent heavy hitters like pizza.com or vodka.com…

Dollars.com set to make lots of euros

stephane.vangelder@indom.com (Stephane Van Gelder) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:42:51 +0200

Auction watching is getting to be a great sport these days. After the fun I had tracking pizza.com as it scaled to ever increasing heights before finally making its previous owner's fortune, I've now got a new hot sale in my sights. Dollars.com is currently being auctioned and I guess it must be a sign of the times that the auction is being handled in euros . So far, the name already stands at a quarter of a million euros. No doubt it will go higher before the auction ends on April 18th…

That's quite a slice!

stephane.vangelder@indom.com (Stephane Van Gelder) — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 19:31:25 +0200

Everybody's been following the pizza.com auction these past few days, as the bids piled up and the price rose above the 2 million USD mark.

Well, the auction ended last night (French time) and the previous owner has got to be ecstatic with the final price: 2.6 million!

The domain's first owner is a one Christopher Clark who lives in Maryland and was tracked down by the Baltimore Sun newspaper. Clarck explained that he'd bought the name in 1994 (on July 17th according to the name's WHOIS) in a bid to get some consultancy work for his company from a local pizza firm. Clark sold his company in 2000 but kept the name.

There's a decision he probably doesn't regret today…

New record sale : casino.de

stephane.vangelder@indom.com (Stephane Van Gelder) — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 10:57:42 +0100

Danish company Balslev Media ApS has paid 400,000 euros (close to US $600,000) for the domain casino.de.

This is probably the second highest sale of a ccTLD domain after poker.de was sold for close to 700,000 euros last year.

Seeing .DE generic names reach such high numbers isn't really surprising. With a total of 12 million registered domains, .DE is the world's second largest extension and Germany is an Internet powerhouse. Other country code domains are also starting to command high prices as buyers recognize the value of these names, just like Balslev Media ApS did.

"It’s the perfect brand name - it’s short and it describes exactly what we do," explains Balslev Media chief Jan Balslev. "Many people will find our website even if they don’t know anything about us through direct traffic, which is acquired when people type in a keyword domain name in their browser and find a service provider without searching for it first. The high price (paid for the domain) also indicates the popularity of online casino and poker gambling on the Web."

Balslev Media ApS will turn casino.de into an online gambling portal "offering independent and thoroughly researched information about gambling on the Internet."

They will undoubtedly also turn it into a great source of online advertising income, through pay-per-click and affiliation partnerships with online gambling website operators keen to feature on such an instantly obvious domain name.

10 million for fund.com!

stephane.vangelder@indom.com (Stephane Van Gelder) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 11:41:47 +0100

I've recently discussed the sale of datarecovery.com for $1.7 million and the fact that recent domain auctions have netted record proceeds. It looks like I'm going to have to start a regular series on how domain names are the best investment around these days .

I know what: to make it easier for your people reading this to identify this type of "domain names bull market" post, I'll carry on using the same "Nasdaq and graph" photo whenever I talk about this…

On to the sale. The sale of fund.com has been announced for US$9,999,950 (c'mon guys, couldn't you have stumped up an extra 50 bucks just to make it a nice round number?). The buyer, very appropriately, is a company called Fund.com which is quoted on the OTCBB (Over The Counter Bulletin Board), a quotation system used to list what are generally microcap companies too small to be traded on a normal stock exchange and therefore traded directly (over the counter). Look up FNDM for fund.com here.

Talking Guinness book of records, this would apparently be the highest recorded domain sale after business.com's 1999 US$7.5 million sale. There does seem to have been a couple of higher sales since business.com, like sex.com (said to have gone for 12 million US) or porn.com (9.5 million US), but these have not been recognised by Guinness.

Up, up… and away!

stephane.vangelder@indom.com (Stephane Van Gelder) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 23:13:04 +0100

There really does seem to be no stopping the domain name market these days. A while back, I suggested that domains were immune to the current bear market environment. Well according to the latest stories from the industry, I was right.

First off there's this new high-figure sale of a domain name that was reported by Dominik Mueller. ESS Data Recovery have reportedly paid $1.7 million for dataRecovery.com. The company explained that it was buying the domain to rise above the growing mass of data recovery companies out there.

Well, there's no arguing with that logic. As unique identifiers on the world's most universal medium, domain names providing undeniable value to people and entities who want to make sure they can easily be found by anyone and everyone.

In fact, the domain market as a whole continued to rise at an impressive rate in 2007, according to figures just released by .COM registry Verisign. A total of 33 million new names were registered worldwide in 2007, for a new total name pool of 153 million.

There's definitely no bear market at the moment as far as domain names are concerned.

The end of the "Google-age"?

stephane.vangelder@indom.com (Stephane Van Gelder) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 13:16:13 +0100

I've often heard industry insiders say that the strong growth in worldwide domain registrations was heavily linked to Google's own stellar performance. As the leading provider of online advertising through its various pay-per-click (PPP) schemes like Adwords and Adsense, Google has been creating value for domain names registrants worldwide, especially domainers.

Domainers –to me the term has no derogatory overtones, it just describes the perfectly legitimate business of dealing in domain names on a professional basis – have been profiting from the success of PPP systems because as they drive traffic to their names, paid adverts mean they can monetize that traffic. Following that logic, the higher a name's traffic-generating potential, the more it's worth.

So as the PPP market leader, Google has been instrumental in putting many domainers in Ferraris and luxury waterfront properties.

But… "On the day Google starts coughing, you'll see domainers getting sick." Is this oft-bandied "expert" prediction true? We may be about to find out…

Continue reading "The end of the "Google-age"?"

What bear market?

stephane.vangelder@indom.com (Stephane Van Gelder) — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 22:30:29 +0100

Are domain names the only commodity immune from the bout of depression currently engulfing assets (financial or otherwise) worldwide? Judging by the number of secondhand domain sales being touted at the moment, it seems so.

The latest sale to be confirmed is freeporn.com for the whopping amount of US$4 million, while domain name auctions held since the start of the year have generated equally impressive numbers.

At the end of last month, Snapnames' live auction netted over US$3 million for some 400 names, the best seller being porn.net for US$400,000. At an another auction, this one specializing in adult names, 60 odd domains pushed total sales up to US$1.1 million. Top seller there was MaturePorn.com for US$130,000, while a bundle of domains was sold for US$550,000.

The secondhand domain market seems to be unstoppable at the moment. Why? Probably because domain name fundamentals are so solid. As unique identifiers, domains have undeniable intrinsic value. Bag yourself a good domain name today, one that is capable of pushing high traffic volumes to your website, and its value can only go up as the Internet continues to grow and strengthen as the world's premier source of information and commerce.

So far, the adult industry seems to understand this better than anyone else. But that can't last forever…