The screenshots below are examples of buyers of domains from the last few months that have either developed their sites, or purchased an upgrade domain and have redirected their acquisition to an existing website.
HelloEnglish.com sold for $15,000 at Sedo, and the site is promoting itself as India’s #1 free English learning app. “Learn English speaking from Hindi, Bengali (India), Telugu, Urdu, Tamil, Kannada, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Malayalam, and Bengali (Bangladesh). A free English learning course used by over 35,00,000 learners for spoken English, English grammar, and vocabulary building.” Alexa rank near 3.6 million.
TFAX.com sold for $11,000 at Sedo, and according to Google Translate, the Chinese language site is aiming to “build the country’s first open, transparent, cross-border financial assets trading platform“.
CareerGuide.com sold for $10,000 at Sedo, and the site is pitching itself as a “one stop destination in helping you understand yourself, the best career for you and providing all the resources in the process.”
EleventhHour.com sold for $9,999 at Sedo, and the owner is Lux Scientiae, Incorporated. They bill themselves as an ‘entertainment logistics’ company, “FOR PEOPLE AND BRANDS WHO VALUE THEIR REPUTATION FOR SPECTACULAR ENTERTAINMENT.“
DBAG.com sold for $8,000 at Sedo, and the owner is Deutsche Beteiligungs AG. No, it’s not used as an abbreviation for the other type of d-bag. This domain is an upgrade from DBAG.de, and it’s now the home of the Germany-based private equity firm.
FootMercato.com sold for $6,540 at Sedo, and the domain is an upgrade from the .net. Per a translation of their French-language site, “Follow all the news Live football: Transfer Info, mercato and results. The current players and football clubs in France and Europe with footmercato.“
MaderaGroup.com sold for $5,500 at Sedo, and the owner is Madera Hotel Management Limited. This is an upgrade for the Hong Kong hotel that already owned domains such as Madera.hk and HotelMadera.com.hk.
I’ve often wondered what came of high dollar sales of domain names with “questionable quality”. Over the years, there have been some extraordinarily high sales for domains that didn’t seem to justify the price.
If someone had the time, it would interesting to take the top 50 publicly reported sales from each of the past 10 years, and document exactly how those domains resolve today. I’ve tried this several times and found a fair number to be either an ad landing page or to not resolve at all. Almost all have privacy protected whois. The odd part is that for $50,000 or $60,000, there were much better domains available at the time.
I like that idea, so we might take a look. When I’ve looked in the past, my recollection is the same as yours, that there was a surprisingly high percentage of domains that weren’t in use.
I observed very high priced domain sales on .info, .co and some other non .com versions (few years back).
I am curious to know what happened after that? are they real sales or dubious promotional activity to hype the registry?