Earlier this year, Domain Tools offered an interesting article concerning the marriage of domain names and the multi-million dollar market-place for premium domain names:
Imagine if when people purchased houses they were not allowed to have mortgages. Sit back and just ponder that for a minute before reading the rest of the article…. When people can purchase $10M dollar domains for $500K down with a 5 percent interest rate that is when we will see the most valuable of domain names start trading hands with the smaller investors. Travel.com is easily worth $50 Million. However not one domain investor has a wallet big enough to afford swallowing it in one bite. No one buys assets that big with all cash. Domains like these will never trade hands until institutional money starts backing our industry.
If you can afford a domain like Travel.com for $10M right now, you will be laughing all the way to the bank in a few years when financing catches up with our industry. $10 Million would be a steal for anyone that purchased Travel.com at this price. Not many people can purchase with all cash right now, but those that do get a good discount because there is a small supply of super rich guys with all cash offers. It all comes back to supply and demand. How many people purchase a house with all cash? If I was the owner of Travel.com I would never sell for $10 Million right now. I would hold out until the institutional money shows up and allows purchase prices to climb into the 10 digit range. Hotels.com was purchased for a song a few years ago, the new owners of this property now know the true power of generic signature domains.
Later in March of 2008, they reported again on the sale of Fund.com
for US$ 10 Million:
Well, technically it sold for $9,999,950 in an all-cash transaction, though I am not sure why $50 was withheld from making it an even $10M. Even in this slow market we are seeing record-setting sales figures. A publicly-reported transaction of this size is rare, I know of a few domains well above $10M, such as Poker.com and Sex.com, that never officially disclosed their prices. The few runners-up so far have been Business.com and Porn.com which both didn’t quite make it to the $10 Million dollar range but were very close.
It takes a lot of work to broker a domain at this price, what could have been registered for nothing 20 years ago is now worth more money then one man could spend. The generic domains that command power are these category domains.
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13.May.08 
Domain Name News 
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Keeping you updated with the state of ICANN, they recently informed us about several new policies that were being implemented.
Tina Dam is in charge of IDNs (Internationalised Domain Names) and bringing a truly multi-lingual era to the internet, where not only the name of the website can be represented by the world’s different languages, but so too would it’s content:
After years of technical and policy development work, a fundamental milestone in the creation of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) has been reached with approval by the ICANN Board to introduce no less than 11 test top-level domains to the root of the Internet.
Literally test TLDs - the term "test" will be translated into Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil and put up on the Net. The top-level domains will host a series of wikis and people from across the world will be encouraged to run free in the new space so ICANN can see how the IDNs function.
With the RegisterFly fiasco finally at an end, it is time for Tim Cole (Services - RAA changes) and Craig Schwartz (Services - Registry agreements) to review the RAA (Registrar Accreditation Agreement), which is the contract that defines the relationship between ICANN and companies registering domain names:
Six suggested amendments to the RAA have been posted on the ICANN website and a public comment period on them, which is also open to other suggested changes, started on 30 July. It will close on 10 September.
In the meantime, a number of registry agreements are being reviewed. The ICANN Board approved renewal of the .name registry contract to 2012 at its 14 August meeting. The approval brings it in line with registry contracts covering .biz, .info and .org.
In a recent board meeting the selection of a company to run ICANN’s data escrow programme (where domain name ownership details are stored by a third party in case of registrar problems).
The Board approved Iron Mountain for the role.
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10.Sep.07
Domain Name News
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.ASIA is almost here! The newest addition to the geo-region specific top level domain (TLD) market follows on the success of the .EU. DotAsia, the sponsoring organization is planning a sunrise period later this year. The term ‘Asia’ which is widely used by businesses and media already is expected to be in high demand by the region’s 400 Million active internet users as a TLD. 400 Million is no small number but this actually only represents 10% of the population in the region. The economy in Asia is the fastest growing in the world. As the economy grows, .ASIA is well positioned to benefit and indeed assist in that growth.
Although the term ′Asia′ is widely recognized throughout the world, Edmon Chung, CEO for the DotAsia Organisation believes that, "the term ‘Asia′ is versatile in its usage, and can be used equally well to signify both where an entity comes from, as well as to identify its intended audience." It is expected that many businesses will have a high degree of interest in .ASIA domains, including: Asian businesses with a regional focus, international companies with Asian-specific sectors; travel firms; and companies that operate expositions in Asia as well as regional info hubs. Anyone interested in getting their own .ASIA domain should visit http://registry.asia for more info. The sunrise period for .ASIA will begin in October 2007.
Domains Recently Sold at Sedo
There are many similarities between investing in domain names and investing in the stock market. With stocks, you earn dividends and with domain names, you can earn parking revenue from natural traffic. With a multitude of investment opportunities to choose from, speculating on domain names is a fairly recent occurrence. The concepts and theories behind domain investing, though, are the same as those of more traditional ventures.
It is important for any serious domain investor to understand the significant relationship between investing in stocks and investing in domains. Stocks provide dividends and the potential for capital growth. Similarly, domains provide revenue and growth potential. Domainers can earn revenue from domains through parking (similar to a stock′s dividends) and sell them for profit (similar to the way capital growth is expressed in the stock market). While the longevity and popularity of the stock market has provided the opportunity for a plethora of research and analysis, the relatively new domain investment market may need many years until it catches up in terms of research.
This report comes from Sedo
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17.Jul.07
Domain Name News
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