Yahoo to auction over 100 domain names ranging from $1,000 to $1.5 million

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/11/13/yahoo-announces-week-long-auction-100-premium-domain-names-ranging-1000-1-5-million/

by bjansn • 13 years ago

29 47 13 years ago

thenextweb.com

theboss• 13 years ago

I wonder how much legacy code can be pushed malware using one of these.

nfoz• 13 years ago

Why buy westerns.com when you could buy .westerns instead?

huskyr• 13 years ago

Ah, av.com. The good old redirect to altavista.com. I wonder how much they payed for that back in the days...

brianbreslin2• 13 years ago

That was exactly my thought. Well is there anything left of the old altavista?

officemonkey2• 13 years ago

Well, there's DuckDuckGo, which is the search engine that reminds me of altavista the most.

vidarh• 13 years ago

There's the way the exclamation mark in the Yahoo! logo at altavista.com temporarily morphs into a mountain....

spada• 13 years ago

surprised not to see broadcast.com on there.

leokun• 13 years ago

The company has simply decided it wants a quick revenue bump as these domains have likely hit their peak in value.

This is a ridiculous observation given that Yahoo has revenue in billions of USD, and no, selling domains for thousands of dollars will not be any kind of meaningful "quick revenue bump." Tech reporting at its finest right here.

brianbreslin2• 13 years ago

The few that go for $1M might have some material impact.

smackfu4• 13 years ago

OTOH, it is definitely the kind of tactic a division head uses to goose their numbers.

elob36• 13 years ago

Did you not read the last paragraph?

For a company that sees quarterly revenues of over a billion dollars, that’s not a big deal, but it definitely can’t hurt either.

Reading comprehension at its finest right here.

jimueller• 13 years ago

The statement is presented as a fact in the article, yet as even the author admits it is probably not true. So I would agree it is amateur journalism.

jonnathanson4• 13 years ago

I really hope the producers of Arrested Development buy finalcountdown.com

jliptzin2• 13 years ago

I guess they're still holding on to broadcast.com. $5 billion for a 301 to yahoo.com, maybe they're waiting for the right buyer.

jlas• 13 years ago

Here are some that caught my eye:

• webserver.com (250k-500k) • finalcountdown.com (10k-25k) • sandwich.com (50k-100k) • airtrafficcontrol.com (10k-25k)

I imagine sandwich.com might be a good asset for a chain sandwich restaurant (subway or quiznos, perhaps).

jliptzin2• 13 years ago

Maybe in 1999...but who actually types [thing I'm interest in].com into a web address bar these days? Even my grandma knows better than that by now.

truncate• 13 years ago

Its not about typing. Its about cool name I guess. Everyone loves and remember a cool name. When you remember things, you communicate that easily and more often. Good for marketing I suppose

hmsimha• 13 years ago

It might sense if they planned to base base a product and a campaign on the acquisition. "Introducing: The Sandwich (tm)" That kind of thing.

corobo• 13 years ago

As the sly boots behind webserver.io I wouldn't mind that first one.. 250K is a bit more than my standard walking around money though

gdilla• 13 years ago

jumpcut was an amazing tool. I wish they didn't deadpool it.

smackfu4• 13 years ago

A lot of them are good old (noun).com. Those seem valuable at first, but is that still the case? It used to be that people would build a brand around something like pets.com, but now it seems much more popular to create a brand name that is more identifiable and trademarkable.

jonnathanson4• 13 years ago

Back in the day, before people understood how the web worked (or was going to work), those people generally assumed that recognizable nouns would (somehow) correlate to higher organic traffic -- as if someone looking to buy pet-related items would think to type "pets.com" into his URL field.

Search engines rendered that logic laughably naive, but I still think there could be some ancillary value in (noun).com as a recognizable and easily recalled domain name. I wouldn't overpay for one, but I wouldn't pass one up if the pricing made sense, and if I had actual plans to do something productive and value-adding with the name. (Buying domain names to squat and flip, under the "Greater Fool Theory," is a game I wouldn't recommend playing.)

On the other hand, the biggest non-technical challenge with buying a generic noun as a domain name is trademarking. Picking too generic a company name is setting oneself up for an uphill battle in today's trademark landscape.

DanielStraight• 13 years ago

Right, so sled.com is probably pretty good, but webserver.com is probably useless. Sled could easily be the name of an app (totally unrelated to sledding of course), but Web Server can't be anything because it's too technical to be useful for anything not related to web servers and too general to be useful for anything that actually is related to web servers.

trevin• 13 years ago

The reason (noun).com domains are desirable is for SEO purposes. A few years ago, it was really easy to rank highly in Google for whatever keywords where in your domain name. For example, if you wanted to rank for [digital cameras] your best bet was to buy digitalcameras.com or some variation of that name.

As SEO has gotten more and more complex, exact match domains (EMDs) don't work quite as well anymore but are still a pretty big ranking signal [1].

For somebody worrying about long term brand appeal, an EMD might not make sense but for somebody launching a new ecommerce store or doing affiliate marketing EMDs are still a great asset to have.

[1] http://mozcast.com/metrics

MayankGoyal• 13 years ago

EMD domains have lost most of their charm. Google's been giving them less and less preferential treatment over the past year. With a recent update some of my EMD sites took a big hit just for the EMD keyword - went from #1-#3 to second page.

dingaling• 13 years ago

Those seem valuable at first, but is that still the case?

Probably not. The only one that springs to mind is diy.com, belonging to UK DIY retail supplier B&Q.

But no-one thinks to visit that domain, so in literature they have to suffix it with 'the website of B&Q'...

minikites• 13 years ago

This article reminded me how mammals.org would redirect to Apple. I just tested it and it doesn't work any longer. :(

winterchil• 13 years ago

Seems more likely that Yahoo is preparing to take a write-down on a collection of assets and is trying to mitigate the total amount by auctioning off the leftovers.

officemonkey2• 13 years ago

Webcal.com for $5000? That seems way too cheap.

richardlblair• 13 years ago

Honestly, I think this is great. Let these solid domains get used.

staunch• 13 years ago

Mostly significantly over valued. They will draw attention though so maybe they'll get high prices.

pajju3• 13 years ago

Fellow HN'ers,

I had purchased a domain which I'm planning to Sell now. (iAppleService.com)

I'm totally new to this Domain Selling business.

- How do you guys proceed to find the Right buyer? Can someone share their experience. Looking for help.

aw3c22• 13 years ago

That looks like a prime candidate for a lawsuit over Apple's trademarks.

pajju3• 13 years ago

Thanks. is it so?

Apple's service is very poor here in India. They just don't care for second world countries. And I had purchased this for that reason. I like to give it away, if goes for a good cause.

sharkweek• 13 years ago

I'm going to be blunt -- that domain is not worth much. It seems to have no current revenue stream, isn't a particularly high value phrase or term, has no existing link equity from an SEO standpoint, and is borderline (if not blatantly) at risk for trademark issues.

You could try some domain auction sites, but I just want you to keep your expectations in check.

pajju3• 13 years ago

why the downvotes? I asked for genuine help in here.

shawabawa3• 13 years ago

probably because people here don't like domain squatters (it sounds like you bought the domain purely to sell it at a profit)

betadreamer• 13 years ago

truestory.com sounds cool

hcho• 13 years ago

truestorybro.com sounds more complete

chatman• 13 years ago

Yahoo is cleaning up the house before vacating it and relocating elsewhere. This is just a garage sale.

aw3c22• 13 years ago

Direct link to the list of known domains for the fellow "enable javascript to see our content"-boycotters out there: http://cdn3.tnwcdn.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2013/11/...

Yahoo to auction over 100 domain names ranging from $1,000 to $1.5 million

Related Stories