I'll take "S" for $1 million, please.

co.uk plural domain goes for $1M - buyer already had the singular

[jtara]

It may be the most ever paid for a single letter of an Internet address. A British travel company has paid $1.1 million for the domain name cruises.co.uk, a price that is effectively $1 million just for the letter "s" since it already owns the address cruise.co.uk. The sum shatters the previous record for a .co.uk domain of $300,000, paid in October last year.

[news.com...]

[Webwork]

Lots of money in the cruise business. I'm sure the PPC isn't cheap. Maybe you aren't all that dependent on search engines when your website name is the industry name? :-P

When you consider they likely spent millions for advertising in magazines, newspaper, etc. in the "old media" this purchase isn't unreasonable.

[ceestand]

Plus think of the free worldwide press coverage they just got!

[Webwork]

Bingo!

When the Business.com deal went public they blew $10-50 million worth of no-charge global publicity by having a website that was utterly useless.

[sem4u]

I think the domain is worth every penny. Sure it is a lot of money upfront, but some cruises cost thousands of pounds. The money spent on the domain could be made back in a year - easily.

As for media coverage, there was a short piece about it on Radio 2 (UK) on Chris Evans' drivetime show last night, which must get a few millions listeners.

Edit - the site is #1 for 'cruises' on Google UK.

More here:

[telegraph.co.uk...]

[JS_Harris]

My latest domain name is worth a million bucks too (not that anybody knows it yet) :)

[walkman]

cruises are worth a fortune. As one who has made some sales for one, I can tell it's nice to see a $400 referral fee added to your account in one shot.

[ogletree]

I agree with the free press. There is no way that you could get that many people talking about your domain for that cheap.

[prfb]

site ... makes ... eyes ... hurt

Oof, before spending $1M I wish they would have spent a little more on design. But maybe it's what their demographic likes.

[bnhall]

13 years ago I sat across a conference table from the CEO of the biggest Cruise Line on earth to convince him to allocate the budget to development & hw for a web site for his company. Things have certainly changed since then!

[walkman]

you should have been registering domain names instead of wasting your time with those guys :)

[zulu_dude]

Taking another angle on this purchase, will it mean every UK webmaster selling a domain name will add a zero to the end of their asking price? For so long now, prices of .uk domain names have lagged quite far behind .com prices (granted, it is a smaller market).

What so many people (particularly non-webmaster-business types) tend to miss is that the value of domains is directly linked to the revenue that can be generated from it. IMHO, widespread stories like this make the average (or below average) webmaster think their rather terrible domains are worth 10x their actual value.

I think $1M for this domain name is worth every cent.

[walkman]

If I had $2 million in the bank, I would have spent $1 mil for this--and made it back with a year or so.

[Phaedrus]

Wow - I'm surprised a .co.uk would command that much. I assume the .co.uk domains get more 'type in' traffic than I had imagined...

[nickreynolds]

So lets all go back to searching for the holy grail of the next $1 mill domain name, that mysteriously no one else has found yet!

[goodsite]

Well there's little chance remains that anyone can get such wealth from doamin names. Some people are already active. It's hardly possible to find a free nice domain name.

[Quadrille]

Not so. Cruises is a seven letter word - there's many thousands of them available for .co.uk - and a fair few for .com even.

time to grab a few friends, a dictionary and a six-pack or three.

*Note - never *buy* a domain under the liberating influence of the amber nectar, but a well-lubricated brain-storm can often come up with a great domain name or two.

[TinkyWinky]

Wow - I'm surprised a .co.uk would command that much

I'm not... there's quite a few at that level that have gone through... just not made public.

The market here is waking up to the fact that the right domain is great for business... especially (in this case) where it comes top of the SERPs on G which is 80%+ of the search market here in the UK.

I think they sold a little cheap IMHO - but a great sale all the same and probably able to bank £500k after tax :).

TW

[edited by: TinkyWinky at 11:26 am (utc) on Feb. 11, 2008]