Business 2.0 has a new article about the rising value on non-.com domain names.
.Com is king. We all know that. But it seems like every week we see huge domain prices for non-.com domains. Of particular interest is .de, which frequently rings up 6-figure sales.
A recent Business 2.0 article discusses this trend. The article reveals (for the first time, I believe) that Hotels.eu sold for $330,000 and Shopping.eu sold for $200,000 back in July via Sedo.
The article points to a few hot international markets:
And in the latest twist, domain investors have been bidding up prices of domain names around the world. The dot-com ending – “.com” – is still the Rodeo Drive of the Web, but as Internet usage spreads around the globe, the demand for suffixes like .eu (European Union), .es (Spain), .cn (China) and .br (Brazil) is heating up, too.
I haven’t seen any sort of “trend” for .br domains, but there’s been lots of news about .es and .cn domains lately. The big question on .eu is whether that massive speculation of the domain will actually reduce its value: too many domains registered for resale rather than use.
Sedo is the undeniable king of international domain sales. The article quotes Tim Schumacher of Sedo:
Tim Schumacher, CEO of domain-name trading website Sedo, says that, like stock investors, domain investors are looking to diversify. And one way to do that is to invest in non-dot-com domains from elsewhere in the world. Several American-based registrars are offering ways to buy domains from other countries, but of course it takes some research to figure out which ones might make sense to gamble on.
Schumacher argues that the trend is just beginning, and in many countries the market has huge potential. A key reason is that in many parts of the world, dot-com is not the preferred domain suffix. In Germany, for instance, companies advertise their .de Web addresses more prominently than their .com addresses. “It’s really a local thing,” he says.
Keep in mind, however, that many countries have restrictions on who can register their domain names. Canadian domains (.ca) are popular but you must have an established link to Canada to register. There are ways around this, such as setting up a foreign entity there, but many would consider this unethical.
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