That domain names have become big business isn’t news to anyone. It is often likened to a virtual real estate business where millions of dollars are at stake. We were curious to see how the most expensive domain names are actually being used today, so we decided to find out.
Kate Donahue from Sedo was kind enough to give us a list of the 20 most expensive domain names, where they were sold and for how much.
With this list in our hands, we went through all of them to see where they lead.
Domain Price ($) Where did it sell? Where does it lead? Sex.com 12,000,000 Private Sale Ad page Porn.com 9,500,000 Moniker/Traffic Porn portal Diamond.com 7,500,000 Private Sale Online store Vodka.com 3,000,000 Sedo Community Seniors.com 1,500,000 Moniker/Traffic Community Tandberg.com 1,500,000 Private Sale Tandberg company Cameras.com 1,500,000 Moniker/Traffic Ad page Scores.com 1,180,000 Moniker/Traffic Scores&Odds Chinese.com 1,120,008 Sedo Ad page Topix.com 1,000,000 Private Sale Community Poker.de 957,937 NICIT/DOMAINfest Partypoker.com NAV.no 717,978 Private Sale Norwegian Labour&Welfare Dollars.com 650,000 DigiPawn.com Casino games On.com 635,000 Moniker/DomainSystems Community Cardiology.com 550,000 Moniker Ad page Macau.com 550,000 Private Sale Portal for Macau Gays.com 500,000 Sedo Community Wrestling.com 500,000 Private Sale Ad page Bike.com 500,000 Sedo Ad page Blue.com 500,000 Sedo Ad page
(Visit these domain names at your own risk. Some contain material that could be considered offensive and/or popup windows.)
Some observations
Out of these 20 domain names…
7 lead to simple ad pages (some of which are parked).
5 lead to communities of some sort (dating sites, etc).
2 lead to casino or poker related sites.
The remaining 6 are a mixed bag of portals, online stores and company sites.
Interestingly, sex.com, a domain name that someone paid 12 million dollars for, is just a simple page with text link ads.
Note: Some may point out that Business.com sold for $345 million, and there may be other similar examples, but the ones listed above are stand-alone domain name sales and as far as we know don’t include an entire business as in the Business.com example.
Not that it is for sale, but one can’t help to wonder what we might get for Pingdom.com…? 🙂