“Business.com sells for $345 million” - Wall Street Journal, July 2007

Welcome to the world of virtual real estate or domaining as it is commonly known within the industry! The market is really taking off. Some believe the industry’s market value could reach $4 billion by 2010. It is estimated that 1,000 to 2,000 individuals currently make a living buying and selling domain names.

Venture capital firms see the potential too. One firm, Highland Capital Partners, recently plunked down more than $20 million on a company with over 600,000 domain names!

In this market, things are moving at a very fast pace. During the first half of 2007, five sales topped the $1 million mark. This included porn.com at $9.5 million, creditcheck.com at $3 million and seniors.com at $1.8. In addition, over 50 names sold for $100,000 or more.

A couple of years ago, an individual named Yun Ye purportedly sold roughly 100,000 names that were generating $20 million per year (or roughly $17 per name per month) for $164,000,000! Think about that for a second… $17 per name per month comes out to 50 cents per day! Fifty cents per day per name and he ended up with $164,000,000. As you can see, in domaining, very small numbers can indeed add up to very large numbers!

This isn’t lost on some of America ’s wealthiest people either. Firms representing American billionaires H Ross Perot and Howard Schultz (founder of Starbucks) plunked down $38 Million into the Internet REIT company, whose President is Marc Ostrofsky, the man who originally sold Business.com in 1999 for a then record $7.5 million.

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