Omicron domain sells for $5,000
The domain name omicronvariant.com, hand-registered less than six months ago, has sold for $5,000 via Sedo, raising all kinds of questions about the value and future of Covid-19 variant-related domains.
The domain, at time of writing, resolves to a Sedo parking page containing ads unrelated (for me) to the pandemic or healthcare.
It was registered in early June, just a day or two after the World Health Organization announced that it would start naming coronavirus variants after letters of the Greek alphabet.
At that time, and to this day, the delta variant is the dominant strain worldwide, and yet deltavariant.com is currently listed for sale for $2,000 at GoDaddy/Uniregistry.
It seems somebody out there is willing to bet that omicron will have the transmissibility speed and longevity to outstrip delta, become dominant, and make dropping $5,000 on the matching .com a wise investment.
Assuming non-nefarious use, I personally struggle to see the end-user value.
It appears that any .com combination of a Greek letter and the word “variant” that had not already been registered by June was quickly snapped up by speculators after WHO revealed its naming scheme.
Some domains, such as alphavariant.com and xivariant.com, were already in use by companies with web sites that predate the pandemic.
The company Nu Variant seems to have dodged a bullet — WHO skipped that letter because it’s a confusing homophone of “new” in some English dialects. It also skipped xi, as it’s a common name that happens to be shared by the premier of China, which was bad luck for the xivariant.com domainer.
All the other letters between delta and omicron have been assigned to variants that fizzled out or have failed to garner much media attention.
At this point, it seems quite possible that WHO will run out of Greek letters in a matter of months, but it reportedly has no current plan for its coronavirus nomenclature after that.
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The name of the Greek letter ‘Ν’ is “ni” and not “nu” in the same way that ‘Μ’ is “mi” and not “mu.”
I know, American Greek sororities and fraternities would be in shock to find out! 🙂
Also, ‘Ξ’ is “ksi” so no real confusion for Mr. Xi Jinping of China whose first name is pronounced as “Tsi.”
I know better than to argue with you about this kind of thing mate, but Wikipedia disagrees with you on pretty much all of that. I did not study Classics, so I have no view.
I’d be more than happy to edit and correct the related English Wikipedia entry. Keep in mind there’s a Greek version of the Wikipedia that can help iron quirks that appear on ye olde English page.