Erroneous reports suggested domain name sold over the weekend.
A number of erroneous reports hit the wire this morning that Israel.com sold for $5.88 million. I just got off the phone with Moniker’s CEO Monte Cahn and he told me these reports were incorrect and the domain name is still for sale.
Apparently the rumors started when a publication, perhaps “TheMarker” or Haaretz, saw the reserve price in the Moniker silent auction and assumed that was a winning bid price.
Israel.com was one of the highest priced domains at Moniker’s live auction during the TRAFFIC show in Orlando two weeks ago. There were rumors that there was a buyer for the domain before the auction but the sale fell through. The seller stipulated that the buyer had to be pro-israel.
The live domain auction brought in about $2.5 million, and the silent auction pushed the total to over $3.0 million. The most expensive domain name sold was DomainRegistration.com, which sold for $376,480 in the silent auction.
Francois says
The FALSE news has already been largely spreaded in forums, blogs, …
This is a good example showing that one need to allways verify his information sources when publishing. It’s never a good sign when all reference the same source of information (Haarets).
Like often Andrew you had a true journalist attitude doing your own research before publish information. Congrats!
I remove the eroneus news from Domaining.com
Andrew says
@ Francois – thanks. This case is unique given that several reputable newspapers reported it. Throughout the day we’ll see several more write about it, not realizing it was false.
Moniker’s PR team is doing its best to correct the reports, too. Perhaps the PR from that will help the domain sell 🙂
The Old Vic says
Thanks for that news – I’mone of the ones that posted the ‘news’ on my blog – I did try to check the check the news by searching round the internet and I found the story had been reported in a number of places – I guess they were all just reporting the same misinformation – so time for an update to my blog I guess !