Just how much did .Blog and .Store sell for?

Here’s a rough idea.

On Friday I wrote about Minds + Machines and its payoff for losing the .blog and .store domain name auctions. Primer Nivel won the auction for .blog and Radix walked home with .Store. How much did they pay for these domain names?

We don’t know for sure based on the data Minds + Machines disclosed, but we can get a general idea of the combined total.

Minds + Machines pocketed $3.4 million. This includes its proceeds from these two auctions plus its refund from ICANN for withdrawing the two applications, minus the amount it paid to beat Google for the domain name .dds.

Using these numbers we can get a general idea of how much .store and .blog went for combined, although not knowing how much it paid for .dds and the split between .blog and .store make it difficult to know for sure.

First, let’s just wipe the small refund from ICANN and offset it with the auction company’s commission. I’m not exactly sure of its fees, but they should be relatively small.

There were 14 losing “shares” of auctions, with 8 losers on .blog and 6 on .store. Not knowing the split between .blog and .store adds an unknown. The proportion paid for .blog and .store probably didn’t exactly reflect the number of players in each auction, but we don’t know for sure. Minds + Machines got 2 shares of the losses, and with the data we have we’ll have to simplify and say that it got 1/7th of the overall pot.

So $3.4M / (1/7) = $24 million

Again, that’s pretty rough given that M + M’s take wouldn’t be exactly 1/7th of the total paid in both auctions.

The real bogey here is how much M + M paid to walk home with .dds. If it was $2 million, our simplified calculation changes to

($3.4M + $2M) / (1/7) = $38 million

Just add how much you think .dds went for to the numerator.

Any way you slice it, these two domain names sold for quite a bit of money.