£1m for 'cheap' domain names

[engine]

The Internet Business Group (IBG) has spent more than £1m to get hold of three domain names. Ironically, the websites it has purchased all start with the word 'cheap'.

£1m for 'cheap' domain names [belfasttelegraph.co.uk]

[lammert]

Maziar Darvish dismissed concerns that the deal was anything but cheap. (...) “I agree that in their own right, domain names are worthless.” (...) He said that the current sites already generate hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of advertising revenue

As I understand it, they bought existing websites, not just the domain names. If these are sites with good traffic, the price might not be that high.

[rj87uk]

Yeah, I just read an article [travelmole.com] about that by Travel Mole, I remember about 3 months ago I got a letter from CheapFlights saying they are closing the non flights section of they're business.

What does this deal include? I know of the 75 domains...

[wardbekker]

Not very clear from the quote, but according to the article they also bought the existing company behind it that already bring in tons of pounds in revenue. So 1M pound is not unreasonable. So nothing web bubbly v2 going on here.

[rj87uk]

If these are sites with good traffic

They have a lot of good traffic and Its not cheap to advertise on them either IMO.

[Receptional]

once IBG replaces the current websites with its own, it expects usage and revenue to grow rapidly

A grand assumption don't you think? I hope they REALLY understand 301 mapping, dupe content and every consequence therein.

Good luck to them though :)

[rohitj]

Somehow for very large sites I don't think duplicate content really matters. Think about how often major companies sydnicate their content. They may be penalized but, with such extraordinary amounts of unique content, I doubt such a penalty would present a significant hurdle--search engines want (and need to) archive them.

In any case, these sites have enough users such that this was a pretty fair valuation in my opinion. Not a bad deal.

[Demaestro]

I really hope that there is some type of estabished traffic for these domains already. They don't do the market place any favors by over paying for domains that have been parked for some time. Which in my view deminishes the property value as penalties and other SE algos may have already identified them as "spam" or "un-relevent" content sites.

What really bothers me is everytime someone pays big bucks for a domain I invision a bunch of people rushing out to register 100s of domains, just to park them and hope someone will pay for them without ever increasing the value of that domain by actually using it to provide content, not ads, but content to those of us arriving there.

I have no problems with nursing a domain to good standing and then selling it along with high rankings for certain keywords, but this whole buy it and park it annoys me.

Kind of like when someone buys up property all over your neighborhood and puts up billboard ads all over the place rather then making the properties nice and giving the nieghborhood a good reputation.

[xalex]

People do not throw money at domain names for the sake of it anymore

Yes they do. Domain game is still big.

[wmuser]

I guess the money were paid more for the traffic/website and not the domains as those domains doesnt worth that much

[SlimKim]

Bill Gates is quoted as saying, "Domains have and will continue to go up in value faster than any other commodity EVER known to man."

I don't konow if Bill actually said it, though I read it quoted by him. And if he did, that don't make it nessacaryily true ... but on the other hand, the pages below do show that big domain sales are trending upward.

Year-To-Date Top 60 Reported Domain Sales
[dnjournal.com...]

View All Reported Domain Sales of $10,000 or more in 2005 here:
[dnjournal.com...]

See Reported Domain Sales of $10,000 or more in 2004 here:
[dnjournal.com...]

[woop01]

Not to side track but are there any estimates on what percentage of purchases are reported vs not reported? I personally know of four purchases that would rank on that list for this year but would never be reported.