This sale shows the .net market isn’t dead.
If there’s one big top level domain that was hurt by the launch of new top level domain names, it’s .net. .Net has typically been a “darn, I couldn’t get the .com” domain extension. Now people can choose from a bunch of other options.
So the sale of Sudoku.net at Sedo for £42,500 (which just came across the company’s RSS feed) is notable. It’s the equivalent of about $53,000 at today’s exchange rate.
NameBio’s all-time list of .net sales over this amount totals 63 names. But no .net domains have publicly sold for this much in the past 12 months.
It’s a big sale for a .net domain, and it shows a bit of life for the extension.
The buyer appears to be a company called Edito. Although the domain was once forwarded to a Sudoku site, it doesn’t appear to have been for many years and a backlink check shows no links.
Alan Built says
It really depends on if the subject matter can be seen an encompassing some type of “network” which games obviously do.
John Colascione says
That is a good point Alan.
Alan Built says
“network” synonymous with “following”
Ethan says
Each TLD always has its buyers no matter what. But to me, .net is out of fashion. I prefer nTLDs and ccTLDs over .net because I think the former are more contemporary.
snoopy1267 says
The problem here is “fashion”. The typical domain hold period is over 100 years. So if that stock is going to go out of fashion the chance of making money is going to be low and the bulk of sales will need to be made in the first few years.
That is the problem with new tlds (which are already seeing declining sales), and rebranded country codes (which come and go in terms of what is popular).
Only .com has genuine staying power.
Ethan says
The definition of the “fashion” I mentioned actually can be interpreted differently from person to person. That’s why I said “to me…” first. My reason is that I have seen very few contemporary businesses/websites use .net.
I don’t doubt .com’s staying power. But I think repurposed ccTLDs such as .co has staying power, too.
snoopy1267 says
The .co extension is seeing a rapid decline in aftermarket activity.
Namebio sales data
2017 – 726 sales
2018 – 470 sales
2019 – 289 sales (so far)