Domain names are hot again
Domain prices are on the rise again with certain URLs such as Truck.com and Beef.com selling for over $100K, and Men.com and Whitehouse.com -- which housed an adult site -- selling or about to sell for more than $1M according to this New York Times story (registration required). We should know since we just acquired Blogit.com a few months ago! :)
The improvement in domain name prices actually began last fall, said Ben Turner, vice president for naming and directory services for Verisign, the company that manages the database of domain names ending in .com and .net and assigns numerical addresses to those names. In the fourth quarter of 2003, the number of active domain names handled by Verisign increased by more than 1.7 million, to 30.4 million.
...Owners of Web sites are also renewing their .com and .net domain names at record levels, Mr. Turner said, with 70 percent renewing in the fourth quarter of 2003, compared with a record low of 45 percent in the first quarter of 2003. "More people are actually using their domains," Mr. Turner said. "Used to be, less than half of the 60 million domains in the world had e-mail or a Web site associated with them. Now it's more than 60 percent."