In 2010, Sex.com sold for a whopping $10 Million cash sum. This event went down in the Guinness World Records for the most expensive Domain-Only sale. 2 years prior to that in 2008, Fund.com sold for just $50 shy than the current record setter ($9,999,950). And going back another year, 2007 also presented another big ticket transfer of Porn.com for another mind boggling sum of $9.5 Million. But why do these domains cost this much?
Easy To Find Web Address
Domain names are an online address for a company’s or individual’s online space, just like in the tangible world, every house or manufacturing plant would have a street address. By making the address shorter and easier to remember, companies work on embedding their online domain into your mind so that the next time you go online, you’ll be more likely to pay them a visit since that’ll be the address that’ll be easier for you to regurgitate.
Easy To Remember
It’s all to do with the way that the human mind remembers things and associates words with items. By making it easier to remember a domain name, organizations in turn make it easier for themselves to market their products and services to you. There are certain words and phrases that people tend to associate with a specific brand or product (e.g. “Just Do It.” by Nike) and they would therefore try typing in the company name, or phrase with a .com ending. You can try it yourself, going to JustDoIt.com will in turn redirect you to the Nike website. Another great example of this is when Facebook paid $8.5 Million for FB.com which will redirect you to the official Facebook website.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
If you’re a marketer then you’re probably already familiar with the term. Search Engine optimization is the term used for the optimization of a whole website or an individual page in order to rank higher in a search engine. Statistically speaking, 45% of people click on the first link in a search engine, 25% on the second and 10% on the thirds, the rest of the links receive a fraction of the traffic.
This brings me to the relevance of the domain name to SEO. A domain name can also be valuable if it includes the keywords that a person is looking for. An example of this might be TelescopicCranes.com (a domain that I own), the domain itself will tell a search engine that this website is about ‘Telescopic Cranes’. This makes for a very valuable domain as it tells the search engine that the specified website is possibly an authority about the subject as well as being specialized in terms of the subject.
Conclusion
As you can see, domain names make a massive impact on the way that people find websites and search in the modern world. When’s the last time that you remembered the full addresses of your 10 closest friends? But I bet that you’ll remember at least 10 domain names for your favorite sites (some of which I probably named here). Hope this article helps you to understand the sky high prices that people and businesses pay for domain names and you’ll value the domain next time you’re online.
