Joseph Peterson reviews the past week in expired domain name sales.
Dilíu is Romanian for “madman”, which is what you’d have to be to believe DiLiu.com sold for $4.9k for any reason other than China. In Chinese, dì liù means “sixth”; dī liú is a “trickle”; and dī liū would be to “carry”. While the domain remains under whois privacy, we can only be 99.9% sure of this rationale; but China is never absent from these charts, and expired Pinyin domains have recently sold as high as $62k.
Pruning.com ($4.4k) was a close second among NameJet’s expired inventory last week. No joke, that auction closed while I was out with the GF buying a weed wacker! Life imitates domaining in uncanny ways. From 2004 to 2013, Blogsome.com ($3.6k) was “a free web hosting site for blogs“. Now defunct.
Domain Name
End $
Domain Name
End $
DiLiu.com
4900
Pruning.com
4357
BlogSome.com
3600
VirtualCapital.com
2401
Hemeng.com
2400
Tacoma.org
2156
CarTransporter.com
2100
SuperSunday.com
2000
Kooler.com
2000
OPEA.com
1755
eBusinessGroup.com
1755
H4H.com
1500
BELV.com
1410
66BOBO.com
1399
AstraGroup.com
1276
LaPadania.com
1030
FirstSouthern
Bank.com
1013
97BOBO.com
1009
EBIM.com
1009
X02.com
1005
LWE.net
1000
YXWZ.com
898
LemaiHui.com
895
HNGAWJ.net
810
SJRF.com
810
UNAPL.org
790
LaPadania.com ($1.0k) is an Italian newspaper – in fact, “the official organ of the right-wing party Lega Nord”. Hemeng.com ($2.4k) appears to be a personal name in both China and Ghana. Tacoma.org ($2.2k) is a large city near Seattle. Another fact not so obvious to non-American readers would be the meaning of SuperSunday.com ($2k), which is the day of the Super Bowl – the culminating game for American football. The phrase has a wholly different meaning in New Orleans.
GlobeTrot.com ($669) is slang for world travel, and by now it’s also associated with the Harlem Globetrotters. Zitan.net ($560) is a prized Chinese hardwood, while Malinche.net may refer to La Malinche, a native woman crucial to the Spaniards’ conquest of the Aztecs and potently symbolic within modern-day Mexico.
Wholesale .NET prices are up again after last week’s brief doldrums. Apart from the pair just mentioned, LWE.net fetched $1k; and a 6-letter acronym, HNGAWJ.net, did nearly as well at $810. Why? Because it had been a Chinese IT website since 2002.
By far the most interesting case to me, though, as someone who studies domain market valuations, must be Transcription.net ($711), which sold alongside Transcripts.net ($110) and Transcriptions.net ($79). Rarely do we see 3 words so similar to one another sell simultaneously at the same venue. It’s as close as we come to a controlled laboratory experiment.
Domain Name
End $
Domain Name
End $
Transcription.net
711
MYUH.com
709
78110.com
705
60807.com
676
GlobeTrot.com
669
DogPeople.com
633
TTXGP.com
620
53877.com
610
1VL.com
605
57880.com
600
UOFIAssembly
Hall.com
594
Zitan.net
560
Malinche.net
560
GamingVegas.com
553
OSLU.com
510
EDCR.com
501
PlanetMichael.com
500
MVIGroup.com
450
TJSX.com
450
TJRG.com
429
EEDigest.com ($301) would probably be a magazine for electrical engineering. EurNex.net ($378) is an excruciating pun. Yes, when a name bugs me I do TalkSmack.com ($377). Registries.org ($312), on the other hand, I quite like. If nTLD registries were to converge on a single website, then it would be tricky for them to decide which TLD to employ. Selecting any of their own extensions would favor one company above another, while rallying around .COM would assuredly undercut their sales pitch. .ORG seems neutral enough to accommodate them all. After all, it is the TLD employed by ICANN itself.
Domain Name
End $
Domain Name
End $
THWK.com
425
TROA.org
425
SBClaw.com
422
ReachWord.com
420
KYNW.com
419
XDYQ.com
410
MasterWave.com
407
KKMedia.com
395
CreditReporter.com
385
EurNex.net
378
TalkSmack.com
377
QXBF.com
375
CashForBitcoin.com
366
BHLB.com
365
GHRD.com
360
MJGE.com
359
95BOBO.com
351
64828.com
350
Registries.org
312
EEDigest.com
301
651000.com
300
Mega
Warehouse.com
292
I was surprised to see Invalids.com go unchallenged for a mere $201. The word is relatively common, and familiar English words tend to do well by dint of their being in widespread use. Perhaps the note of pessimism in the term was a turnoff for buyers, but I would have expected a higher price even so. And yet EvenLess.com ($161) went for even less.
Splendicity.com ($260) is fun to say. For that matter, so is YKTA.com, which I wouldn’t be surprised to find as an acronym for a youth group or kindergarten teachers’ association. Shepherds.net ($260) probably corresponds to many existing brand names with longer domains. And speaking of length, it’s interesting to see the prices paid for the 4-word .NET ($211) and .ORG ($171) below.
Domain Name
End $
Domain Name
End $
602555.com
285
BitsOnline.net
285
Comics2Film.com
270
AuctionDealers.com
266
Splendicity.com
260
Shepherds.net
260
Splandoo.com
230
01380.com
226
IUPAB2014.org
220
Xinyusi.com
219
FortLauderdale
RealEstate.net
211
YKTA.com
210
49205.com
201
Invalids.com
201
CXMO.com
199
UGNO.com
190
AgisMap.com
180
SBNFA.org
171
AmericanInstitute
ForHistory.org
171
Asiva.com
169
FENews.com
166
EvenLess.com
161
ZRET.com
160
AKF.com
159
UZIZ.com
155
MusicaBona.com
154
As an avid collector, I always hate to see music shops go under. MusicaBona.com was a classical music store centered in Prague with a site that ran for 15 years. OverseasLiving.com ($133) will make a good name for an expat info site. I’d declare DigitalBinoculars.com ($129) the best buy in this week’s list. Here we have an exact-match domain for an e-commerce product that retails at $1.6k or more. Permission to kick yourself granted.
Domain Name
End $
Domain Name
End $
98BOBO.com
151
58447.com
139
OverseasLiving.com
133
Digital
Binoculars.com
129
OTXO.com
122
Abbys-Good-
Stuff.com
120
ChoiceMag.org
113
Transcripts.net
110
ShagMail.com
109
EffectiveWeb.com
109
THWO.com
109
TrafficTime.com
109
SurrealismNow.com
108
BluesAnd
HeritageFest.com
106
ISSA-INTL.org
100
RSWU.com
99
TSWU.com
99
MaxFilms.com
99
WebHost
Directory.com
94
NUYG.com
93
OneDinner.com
90
IPTI-Malaria.org
90
The BarrieSpeedway.com ($71) in Ontario, Canada, recently shut down after 45 years. Even though the internet is full of content writers for hire, most of them have no experience entertaining kids. So KidMagWriters.com ($80) is actually an important commercial niche; and this domain, long though it seems, is actually a very short rendition of “writers for kid magazines”. KidWriters.com, although better, would be ambiguous – writers for children or writers who are children?
Domain Name
End $
Domain Name
End $
MuchJoy.com
89
OnlineTeacher
Certification.com
85
GetACall.com
80
KidMagWriters.com
80
Alaska
ProChoice.org
80
BGWEA.org
80
H2PInc.com
80
Tratado.com
79
Transcriptions.net
79
CepaGallery.com
79
iTribe.net
79
BeautyCulture.com
79
RDelSol.com
79
TheFinanceClub
OfBrussels.org
73
Barrie
Speedway.com
71
SponsorWorld.com
69
IXMA.org
69
Gosaic.com
69
WebInsurance.net
69
LawServices.org
69
But the real question this week undoubtedly must be this: How many Bobos do we need? 66BOBO.com ($1.4k) … 97BOBO.com ($1.0k) … 95BOBO.com ($351) … 98BOBO.com ($151). Will Bobo domains be the next hot niche for China?
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