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"Posted on Wed, Feb. 13, 2002
Resale of domain names goes bust along with the dot-com era
By Reid Kanaley
Knight Ridder
Timothy Lee prompted some head-scratching two years ago when he said he turned down $8 million cash and $30 million in stock for the ``cool.com'' Web address he had registered years earlier for free.
Today, for lack of funding, the Cool.com site that Lee, of Seattle, tried to build into a Web community for teenagers is a virtual ghost town. Its assets, including the once-hot domain name, await any interested bidder.
The market for simple, catchy dot-com names isn't what it used to be. Speculators who scarf up Internet domain names -- the part of a Web address after the ``www'' -- to resell for profit say top prices have fallen about 90 percent since the dot-com go-go era.
Gone is the craziness of the late 1990s, when business.com sold for a record $7.5 million.
An informal tour of Web sites built on some common, generic words seems to show that -- as with cool.com -- addresses are no key to Internet popularity.
Often, no site even exists. Addresses such as college.com, chairs.com and religion.com stand abandoned or unused.
``We don't have anything cooking for it right now,'' Dianna Ott, spokeswoman for the Presbyterian Church (USA), said of religion.com. The Web address was donated to the denomination a year ago. ``We are holding it. We will not release it. We will not sell it. But we don't have any firm plans right now on how we will use it.''
And in cyberspace today, rock beats both paper and scissors. Rock.com, which once traded hands in a deal valued at $1 million, is a feeble site with links for entertainment news and an Internet radio show. It is not much. But paper.com and scissors.com are dormant.
Some other addresses bear no literal relationship to the kinds of services or information on the Web sites to which they deliver the curious.
Take fruits and vegetables, for example.
Apple.com, of course, is the Mac computer site. Peach.com is the Web site of accounting software company Peachtree Software. Orange.com belongs to an offshore wireless-phone company. The double-meaning date.com is a matchmaking site.
Those fruits at least seem to be lending themselves to useful purposes. Veggies do not do as well. Carrot.com is an oddball site showing 3-D slide shows (you can order 3-D glasses for $1 a pair). Cucumber.com is an address for sale. Potato.com is dormant.
But there is broccoli.com, which is actually about -- ta-da -- healthy and nutritious broccoli, and how lovingly it is grown and bagged by the Mann Packing Co.
Flower.com and flowers.com identify online florists. Addresses bearing the names of specific flowers, however, are less predictable. Daisy.com is a tribute to the venerable pellet gun. Lily.com is the site of a truck-leasing company.
Plenty of other addresses are right on their marks. Books.com is one entree to the Barnesandnoble.com Web site. Health.com gets you the online content of Health magazine. Money.com connects to the financial news site run jointly by CNN and Money magazine. Sex.com is a porn site.
A logical Web address was never the prerequisite for online popularity, as proven by search-engine address google.com, portal destination yahoo.com, and bookseller turned Web department store Amazon.com.
But generically named Web sites do generate ``type-in hits'' -- traffic from people simply guessing at Web addresses. So owning sex.com is ``no gold mine, but it's better than a sharp, hot stick in the eye,'' said Gary Kremen, who registered sex.com for free in May 1994.
In the most expensive Web address deal ever, a dot-com incubator called eCompanies paid $7.5 million for business.com in late 1999, and launched it as an advertising-supported search and portal site about business.
``We quickly accumulated many impressions just based on our name alone, without any marketing,'' said Sarah Hughes, spokeswoman for Business.com. ``Buying a generic URL actually did help us in our branding efforts.''
ECompanies has managed to keep business.com online, but corporate upheaval and dot-com failures have sent some other Web addresses bouncing into new hands.
Toys.com was the property of eToys.com, a Web retailer that went belly-up last year before being bought by the parent of KB Toys. Wine.com is under new ownership, after the previous owner of the address, who paid $3 million for it, went bankrupt.
University.com, which once traded hands for $530,000, takes Web surfers to the home page of EntrePort, an online training company whose stock was trading recently at 6 cents a share.
Cool.com owner Lee, 29, now works as a consultant to an unrelated business. He said he was often asked if he regretted not selling the address when he was offered millions for it.
``I don't,'' he said recently. ``It was quite a learning experience.'' He declined to elaborate.
The days of multimillion-dollar offers for Web addresses are over for good, some experts said. ``The funny money has ended,'' said Larry Erlich, president of DomainRegistry.com.
``A foolish person and their money can be separated pretty quickly,'' but there are fewer fools about these days, said Jeremy Padawer of Domainappraiser.com. ``Decisions being made now are being made by much more shrewd people.''
``We've certainly peaked,'' said Mark Goldstein, whose recent auction of biotech-related domain names went begging in December. Goldstein's company, the International Research Center, attempted to auction scores of names, including humangeneticcode.com and sendintheclones.com. He had hoped to get as much as $4,000 per address.
``I got some nibbles, but no solid bites,'' Goldstein said. ``For me, it was not a successful effort to sell them in that way.''
But there is always another day, he said. ``Personally, I still believe that warehousing these names makes sense for me as a business opportunity.''
The introductions of Web addresses with ``.biz,'' ``.info'' and other endings -- including a rollout recently of addresses ending in ``.name'' -- have done nothing to diminish Web surfers' tendency to type in ``.com'' when making a guess at finding a Web site.
``Dot-com continues to remain the Park Avenue of addresses,'' said Patrick Burns, spokesman for VeriSign, which keeps track of .com, .net and .org registrations."
siliconvalley .com/mld/siliconvalley/business/technology/personal_technology/2666167.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp
Resale of domain names goes bust along with the dot-com era
By Reid Kanaley
Knight Ridder
Timothy Lee prompted some head-scratching two years ago when he said he turned down $8 million cash and $30 million in stock for the ``cool.com'' Web address he had registered years earlier for free.
Today, for lack of funding, the Cool.com site that Lee, of Seattle, tried to build into a Web community for teenagers is a virtual ghost town. Its assets, including the once-hot domain name, await any interested bidder.
The market for simple, catchy dot-com names isn't what it used to be. Speculators who scarf up Internet domain names -- the part of a Web address after the ``www'' -- to resell for profit say top prices have fallen about 90 percent since the dot-com go-go era.
Gone is the craziness of the late 1990s, when business.com sold for a record $7.5 million.
An informal tour of Web sites built on some common, generic words seems to show that -- as with cool.com -- addresses are no key to Internet popularity.
Often, no site even exists. Addresses such as college.com, chairs.com and religion.com stand abandoned or unused.
``We don't have anything cooking for it right now,'' Dianna Ott, spokeswoman for the Presbyterian Church (USA), said of religion.com. The Web address was donated to the denomination a year ago. ``We are holding it. We will not release it. We will not sell it. But we don't have any firm plans right now on how we will use it.''
And in cyberspace today, rock beats both paper and scissors. Rock.com, which once traded hands in a deal valued at $1 million, is a feeble site with links for entertainment news and an Internet radio show. It is not much. But paper.com and scissors.com are dormant.
Some other addresses bear no literal relationship to the kinds of services or information on the Web sites to which they deliver the curious.
Take fruits and vegetables, for example.
Apple.com, of course, is the Mac computer site. Peach.com is the Web site of accounting software company Peachtree Software. Orange.com belongs to an offshore wireless-phone company. The double-meaning date.com is a matchmaking site.
Those fruits at least seem to be lending themselves to useful purposes. Veggies do not do as well. Carrot.com is an oddball site showing 3-D slide shows (you can order 3-D glasses for $1 a pair). Cucumber.com is an address for sale. Potato.com is dormant.
But there is broccoli.com, which is actually about -- ta-da -- healthy and nutritious broccoli, and how lovingly it is grown and bagged by the Mann Packing Co.
Flower.com and flowers.com identify online florists. Addresses bearing the names of specific flowers, however, are less predictable. Daisy.com is a tribute to the venerable pellet gun. Lily.com is the site of a truck-leasing company.
Plenty of other addresses are right on their marks. Books.com is one entree to the Barnesandnoble.com Web site. Health.com gets you the online content of Health magazine. Money.com connects to the financial news site run jointly by CNN and Money magazine. Sex.com is a porn site.
A logical Web address was never the prerequisite for online popularity, as proven by search-engine address google.com, portal destination yahoo.com, and bookseller turned Web department store Amazon.com.
But generically named Web sites do generate ``type-in hits'' -- traffic from people simply guessing at Web addresses. So owning sex.com is ``no gold mine, but it's better than a sharp, hot stick in the eye,'' said Gary Kremen, who registered sex.com for free in May 1994.
In the most expensive Web address deal ever, a dot-com incubator called eCompanies paid $7.5 million for business.com in late 1999, and launched it as an advertising-supported search and portal site about business.
``We quickly accumulated many impressions just based on our name alone, without any marketing,'' said Sarah Hughes, spokeswoman for Business.com. ``Buying a generic URL actually did help us in our branding efforts.''
ECompanies has managed to keep business.com online, but corporate upheaval and dot-com failures have sent some other Web addresses bouncing into new hands.
Toys.com was the property of eToys.com, a Web retailer that went belly-up last year before being bought by the parent of KB Toys. Wine.com is under new ownership, after the previous owner of the address, who paid $3 million for it, went bankrupt.
University.com, which once traded hands for $530,000, takes Web surfers to the home page of EntrePort, an online training company whose stock was trading recently at 6 cents a share.
Cool.com owner Lee, 29, now works as a consultant to an unrelated business. He said he was often asked if he regretted not selling the address when he was offered millions for it.
``I don't,'' he said recently. ``It was quite a learning experience.'' He declined to elaborate.
The days of multimillion-dollar offers for Web addresses are over for good, some experts said. ``The funny money has ended,'' said Larry Erlich, president of DomainRegistry.com.
``A foolish person and their money can be separated pretty quickly,'' but there are fewer fools about these days, said Jeremy Padawer of Domainappraiser.com. ``Decisions being made now are being made by much more shrewd people.''
``We've certainly peaked,'' said Mark Goldstein, whose recent auction of biotech-related domain names went begging in December. Goldstein's company, the International Research Center, attempted to auction scores of names, including humangeneticcode.com and sendintheclones.com. He had hoped to get as much as $4,000 per address.
``I got some nibbles, but no solid bites,'' Goldstein said. ``For me, it was not a successful effort to sell them in that way.''
But there is always another day, he said. ``Personally, I still believe that warehousing these names makes sense for me as a business opportunity.''
The introductions of Web addresses with ``.biz,'' ``.info'' and other endings -- including a rollout recently of addresses ending in ``.name'' -- have done nothing to diminish Web surfers' tendency to type in ``.com'' when making a guess at finding a Web site.
``Dot-com continues to remain the Park Avenue of addresses,'' said Patrick Burns, spokesman for VeriSign, which keeps track of .com, .net and .org registrations."
siliconvalley .com/mld/siliconvalley/business/technology/personal_technology/2666167.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp
