More than US$4 million of domain names have been sold at the recent Moniker TRAFFIC WEST Live Auction in Las Vegas; the domain name Families.com achieved a price of US$650,000, while Greeting.com went for US$350,000 and Blogster.com went for $275,000.

In total, 155 domains, or 67 percent of the domains offered for sale were successfully sold. The average buyer spent over $77,000 during the three hour event. Some of the other top sales included ET.com ($225,000), Settlement.com ($200,000), OL.com ($150,000), PX.com ($120,000), HomeForeclosures.com ($90,000), RealEstate.mobi ($85,000), Mozambique.com ($82,500), and Mobel.net ($50,000).

According to Monte Cahn, co-founder and CEO of Moniker.com, all the top-level domain extensions, including .mobi, .net, and .org. had good representation and sales at the auction.

“Domainers and businesses alike are realizing the value of premium domain names as real investment opportunities,” said Cahn. And yes, if you’re wondering, apparently domainers is a real word, meaning “the professionals who deal in domain names”. 

Cahn went on to say that the success of the recent auction proves that  ”individuals and companies are willing to pay significant sums of money to help manage and grow their online brand reputation. Moniker’s sale percentage was more than double what it has averaged at previous auctions.”

Moniker is running a silent domain=name auction until March 14. Individuals can access the Silent Auction by visiting http://www.moniker.com/silentauction/index.jsp Moniker’s next Live Auction of domain names will be during TRAFFIC New York on June 19-22, 2007 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel.

If you ever tried to register a meaningful domain name for a new web site, especially a .com site, you will have found that every conceivable word in every language, every acronym, has been taken. Obviously a lot of the domain names have been taken by speculators, and now if you want to get a meaningful domain name, it looks like you have to pay for the privilege.

During the dot.com boom, every man and his dog was buying domain names, believing that they’d be able to on sell them at a huge profit. Some people did manage to make money (obviously they had compelling domain names), but most didn’t. When the dot.com crash came, it really took the wind out of domain name speculation. 

Now with Web2.0 gathering momentum, maybe it’s time to check again what domain names you might have registered during the dot.com boom. Who knows, maybe they could be worth something now.

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Entry was posted on Saturday, March 10th, 2007 at 4:25 pm under Internet.

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