As internet legends have it, Sex.com sold for $12m. No-one was really that surprised; the business opportunities there are, um, well established. Business.com sold for $350m, and Vodka for $3m, all curiously, if not rather crudely, commoditising our lives.
Photo by Richard Jones on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
There was a little more surprise last week when someone paid $2.6m for the address "pizza.com" - not least for the unsuspecting cybersquatter who'd been sitting on the domain for 14 years. Chris Clark bought pizza.com for $20 in 1994 and did a minimum amount of advertising on it until expanding it into a pizza directory service last year.
"I thought, 'Why don't I just try to see what the level of interest is?'. If someone's willing to pay that much for Vodka.com, maybe there's more interest in pizza.com."" he told the Baltimore Sun. His only regret was not buying more domains at the time.
A nod to Pete from Downloader who spotted the ongoing sale on Sedo last week; bidding shot up from $100 to $160,000 on the day the auction started, and topped $1m two days later. The auction closed at $2,605,000.
The days of hoarding natty web domains have long since gone; all I've got is citizenjournalism.tv and that's a bit of a turkey. Anyone sitting on any good ones?
