Amazon.com paid $4.6 million to win rights to .buy top level domain name, but that wasn’t the most expensive TLD auction on Wednesday.
You might think new top level domain names aren’t meeting early expectations, but applicants still apparently value the opportunity very high.
ICANN held its second “auction of last resort” for new top level domain names today. Three contention sets were resolved at multi-million dollar prices.
Here are the results:
.Tech sold for $6,760,000 to Dot Tech LLC. I’ve heard of some private contention set auctions closing for about this price, but I suspect this is a record or close to it. Three bidders bid at least $6.2 million in the auction. (I’ve heard it’s not a record, but definitely toward the high end maybe not.)
DotTech beat out Google, Uniregistry, Nu Dot Co, Donuts and Minds + Machines.
.Buy sold for $4,588,888 to Amazon.com.
Amazon beat Google, Donuts and Famous Four Media in the auction. PVT Registry did not participate. Only two bidders bid above $1.5 million.
.VIP sold for $3,000,888 to publicly traded Minds + Machines.
It beat Google, VIP Registry, Donuts, I-Registry and Vipspace Enterprises LLC. Three bidders were willing to pay at least $2.2 million in the auction.
Unlike with private contention set auctions, the losers in these auctions walk away with nothing, other than a small refund on their application fee.
Wow is the right word, hopefully they have big plans.
Only means more premiums, and a tighter reserve list, step right up folks, and put your pre orders in.
Considering some of those companies have billions in cash available to deploy, those prices aren’t that high.
Maybe minds and machines will use their proven marketing expertise to sell twenty .vip domains on day one.
thats really awesome, Amazon rules this time… bad news for google, looks like Amazon have some really big plans
Reserving a bunch of names to boost their business, register the rest and then over price what is left so competition is scarce on this front is my guess.
Well Google has the cash. The fact that they are losing every auctions probably means they aren’t all that crazy about the space.
Where to register .buy domains?
Big companies make mistakes too ya know
Quite likely the main goal of all these registrars all along is to have this happen.
2-5 million split among 2-5 employees (especially if you have other income streams)…is a pretty nice payout.
Good news google didn’t win those names. For that reason .com will still be the King
Pretty silly these strings did not go to private auction. Was Amazon or Google (or both) the holdout?
I believe Amazon did one private resolution, so my guess is Google was the holdout.
Muscles are more than muscles, so some companies can be so aggresive at new domains?