14 DAY TRIAL // The year is barely underway and the first million dollar domain sale has already been announced. Dudu.com was sold for $1 million, €769,000 to a Dubai company named, quite obviously, DUDU Communications.
The company operates a social networking site that comes with built-in translation, enabling anyone in the world to talk to each other.
The site had been hosted at godudu.com, but the company wanted the shorter version that actually contained the social network's name. As such, it went out looking to buy dudu.com from its former owner, a Chinese company.
Dudu.com is a memorable domain name and a rather short one, so it was bound to fetch a decent price. But there aren't that many people or companies in the world that would pay $1 million for it.
Most likely, there's just one company willing to spend that much on that domain and that's the company that just bought it.
"With the purchase of dudu.com, we will be able to match our platform’s brand with the exact domain name we need, and migrate from using godudu.com to this shorter version," Alibek Issaev, Dudu's chairman, wrote.
"This purchase means we don’t lose important traffic, and at the same time we ensure that visitors from around the globe will remember our brand’s name," he explained.
Sedo, the company that brokered the deal, revealed that the negotiations took three months and that the original owner had no intention of selling the domain prior to being contacted with an offer.
At this price, it's pretty clear that the previous owner got as much as he could have hoped for the domain and made quite a nice deal. As for the new owner, obviously, it believed that the domain was important enough to warrant the price. Then again, in a country where people spend this type of money on cars, perhaps it didn't seem that expensive.