Domain Names for Sale

Premium Domain Names - PPC Auctions

Super Star Domains

In a T.R.A.F.F.I.C event sponsored by Moniker, held on May 2007 at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, the domain name porn.com sold for 9,500,000. And this comes after a domain auction just a few months before, when it failed to sell for a reserve bid of 7,500,000!

But it's not just the naughty names that sell... A few months earlier, moniker sold computer.com for 2,200,000. And the list goes on... Scores.com sold by Moniker in a casino related domain name sale in Amsterdam on May 07 for 1,180,000. A Moniker auction in New York city last June netted 3,000,000 for CreditCheck.com and 1,800,000 for Seniors.com.

Yet for each auction with headline grabbing domain names, there are plenty of domains that aren't as talked up that sell for many thousands of dollars as well. Even .net and .info are heating up with names like ringtones.net fetching $175,000 (moniker) and NewYork.info selling for $70,000 (private sale). And hundreds of domains routinely sell on afternic, sedo and tdnam everyday for hundreds or thousands of dollars.

But perhaps the most mind boggling sale to date of a premium domain name in a secondary market auction has to be Business.com. This domain was purchased for 7.5 million in 1999 from an individual owner who had paid $150,000 it.

The company that bought it, eCompanies, was ridiculed for that deal. But hang on... it looks like they got the last laugh. They just sold Business.com in July 2007 for the record price of 345 million dollars. Other reported bidders interested in the name were the Dow Jones and the NY Times. Who's laughing now?

In short, Premium Domain Names are on fire! But why? ...what's going on here?

Panning for Pay Per Click Gold...

Just why exactly are so many people and companies spending millions of dollars and euros buying premium domain names in this new domain name land rush?

The reason is simple... direct type in traffic. As we mentioned in part 1 of this article, many people these days simply bypass the search engines altogether, and type a keyword into their browser bar, either without the .com added or they simply add .com, .net or other URL to the end of the search term. This is also known as direct navigation.

Web surfers do this, knowing it will produce a domain or page that is highly tailored to what they are looking for. Why? Because to stay in business, many web publishers, blog and forum owners, and even e-mail newsletter publishers take advantage of "pay per click" or clickthrough advertising.

Pay Per Click ads are sponsored placements that are automatically generated by a simple line of code from Yahoo, Google and other search engines and domain parking sites. Publishers place this code on their site or blog, and it automatically pulls keywords from the title of their domain, plus whatever meta words and content make up their site. An ad placement related to that content is then "served" by the search engine. Thus, highly relevant ads and links for a site's keywords will appear.