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Is gold.co.uk the most expensive .uk name sale yet?

Kevin Murphy, September 18, 2015, Domain Sales

The domain name gold.co.uk has reportedly changed hands for £600,000 ($940,000), potentially making it the biggest .uk domain sale ever.
The new owner of the domain is Jewellery Quarter Bullion, a Birmingham, UK-based online gold seller.
The deal was announced by press release yesterday.
Whois records archived by DomainTools show that the company has actually owned the domain since at least November last year, and the oldest available record shows that .uk registry Nominet verified the buyer’s identity in December 2012.
So it’s not a recent sale. The press release seems to have come out to plug the new web site at gold.co.uk, which only went live in the last couple of months.
It’s also debatable whether it’s the biggest sale, depending on the currency you use.
Six hundred grand in GBP would be £40,000 more than was paid for cruise.co.uk, the current DN Journal .uk record holder.
But DNJ, the industry touchstone for secondary market sales leagues, compiles its rankings based on the USD value at the time of the sale. At the time cruise.co.uk sold in 2008, it was worth $1,099,798.

M+M gets $3.5m from two gTLD auctions

Kevin Murphy, August 27, 2015, Domain Sales

Minds + Machines secured loser fees totaling $3.5 million from its participation in .art and .data new gTLD auctions, the company disclosed today.
It seems .data was auctioned recently. It was a three-applicant string and none of the applicants have yet withdrawn their applications.
It seems either Donuts or brand applicant Dish DBS won the string.
The .art auction happened well over a month ago, with the final losing applicant withdrawing on July 23.
UK Creative Ideas won .art. Whatever it paid for the string would have been shared between nine competing applicants.
M+M also said that “strong interest” (presumably no sales yet) has been expressed in its $15,000+ “super premium” registry-reserved names, and that it has sold 20 premium names in its .london auction last month.

Dot London auctioning 50 registry-owned premium names

Kevin Murphy, July 13, 2015, Domain Sales

Dot London is to auction off 50 premium .london domains over the next two weeks.
The names are all currently registry-owned, and include the likes of dentist.london, flats.london and coffee.london. The full list can be viewed here.
The auctions are scheduled to end on July 30 and all have £100 ($155) starting bids.
According to the registry, it has sold over 3,000 names from its premium list since its launch last year. Some live examples include golf.london and catering.london.
The .london gTLD has a tad over 63,000 names in its zone file today.

New musical named after (and uses) new gTLD domain

Kevin Murphy, July 3, 2015, Domain Sales

How’s this for a high-profile registrant?
A new stage musical, co-written by Blur front-man Damon Albarn, has opened in the UK this week, and it’s named after a new gTLD domain name.
wonder.land is a take on Alice in Wonderland that reportedly “tells the story of a 21st Century teen who immerses herself in a psychedelic online game.”
The production, which is running previews in Manchester until July 12 before transferring to the National Theatre in London this November, is using the domain wonder.land.
Reviews have been mixed.
.land is a Donuts gTLD with about 13,000 domains in its zone.
Chrome users who search for wonder.land in their browser address bar will be taken to the domain rather than a search results page.

DomainFest to hold one-day event this June

Kevin Murphy, April 30, 2015, Domain Sales

DomainFest is heading to Bulgaria for a special one-day conference a little over a month from now.
NamesCon, which now owns the DomainFest brand, plans to hold the event June 3 at the Kempinski Hotel Marinela in Sofia.
It will be sandwiched between the fifth annual DomainForum — June 1-2 in Varna and Ruse — and EuroDIG — and internet governance conference June 4-5 also at the Kempinski.
The focus of the event appears to be very much on the domain investment side of the industry.
Tickets for DomainFest will be €125 ($140) on the door, but can be acquired for the early-bird price of €49 until the end of April (that is, today). Dinner costs another €40.
DomainForum, as ever, will be free to attend.
The schedule, which has not yet been finalized, can be found here. Tickets for DomainFest and DomainForum can be obtained here.
DI may attend.

Go Daddy splashes out $28m on Marchex domain portfolio

Kevin Murphy, April 22, 2015, Domain Sales

Go Daddy has acquired about 200,000 domain names from Marchex for $28.1 million.
The sale comes as Marchex seeks to extricate itself from the domain name business in order to focus on mobile advertising analytics.
It works out at about $140 per domain.
Go Daddy said that it will make the domains available via its multi-registrar Afternic platform, which should massively increase their visibility among potential buyers.
The deal was a “unique opportunity” that doesn’t represent a change in direction for the registrar.
Domain Name Wire has an interview with company senior VP Mark McLaughlin over here which explains Go Daddy’s plans in a bit more detail.
Marchex said that it has also sold $6.7 million worth of domains from the portfolio separately since January.

ICM sells tube.xxx (again) in $500,000 deal

Kevin Murphy, April 7, 2015, Domain Sales

ICM Registry has sold the premium domain name tube.xxx for a second time, after repurchasing it from the original buyer.
The sale was part of a $500,000 package that also included livecam.xxx, affair.xxx and hookups.xxx.
The buyer this time is Inn Productions, a previous supporter of .xxx.
The tube.xxx domain was originally sold to a porn producer called Really Useful as part of a deal that also include the plural, tubes.xxx.
But after Really Useful was acquired by former ICM nemesis Manwin Licensing, ICM reacquired the undeveloped domain to resell later.

Live gTLD .reise sold at auction

Kevin Murphy, March 3, 2015, Domain Sales

The first auction of a live new gTLD resulted in a sale, I can reveal.
Dotreise’s .reise, which is German for “.travel”, changed hands in an auction managed by Applicant Auction last Friday.
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to identify the winning bidder or the winning bid, but the winner’s identity will inevitably be revealed sooner or later.
Applicant Auction had said there was to be a $400,000 starting bid on the gTLD.
.reise has been general availability since August but has only about 1,300 names in its zone file. It retails for up to $180 a year.
If the TLD’s new owner is not Donuts, the company will find itself competing with Donuts’ much cheaper and more popular .reisen.

Sex.co for sale at $200,000

Kevin Murphy, February 20, 2015, Domain Sales

Remember when sex.com sold for $13 million?
The owner of sex.co, which according to Whois is Amsterdam-based Quattro Media Co, has put the domain on the market with a buy-it-now price of $200,000.
That’s according to Heritage Auctions, which says it is managing the sale.
There are no buyer’s fees associated with the offer, HA said in an email blast.
Given there’s only one letter difference between sex.com and sex.co, you’d imagine that the .co benefits from a fair bit of typo traffic. The domain is currently parked.
For sale at less than 2% of the price that sex.com went for back in 2010, would $200,000 be a bit of a bargain?

Schwartz sells porno.com for $8.9 million

Kevin Murphy, February 3, 2015, Domain Sales

The domain name porno.com has changed hands for $8,888,888, making it the fourth highest-value domain to be sold.
The seller is domain investor Rick Schwartz, notorious for owning lots of category-killer domains but hardly ever selling them. The buyer is WGCZ, a Prague-based company.
According to DN Journal, the sale is the fourth biggest ticket domain to be sold in an all-cash deal.
Schwartz bought the domain for $42,000 in 1997 from a college student who had acquired it the previous week for $5,000, according to a press release.
He said he’s made over $10 million from the domain with pay-per-click sales or redirecting traffic to other porn sites.
The related domain porn.com sold for $9.5 million in 2007. The highest-value deal to date is sex.com, selling for $13 million in 2010. The only non-porn domain to sell for more is fund.com, which fetched $9,999,950.