He is not crazy who asks, but he who gives

Feb 7, 2008 19:26 GMT  ·  By

I do not want to go ahead and lecture people with (presumably, not likely) greater understanding of money than myself, but paying $1 million for a single letter in a domain seems utter folly. I don't know whether to scorn at the idea or to laugh at the very thought that somebody was generous enough to make this charitable a donation for no particular reason.

Ok, I'll back up with that last affirmation. The company who bought the domain had a very clear picture in its head, to avoid any competition registering and taking advantage of a typo or anything of the sort or to have its brand stand tall on the Internet. Or just to get the publicity that paying one million dollars for one letter automatically brings.

Time to reveal the mysterious (so far) buyer. A British travel company, already owning the site cruise.co.uk (it's not even a dot com site!), paid the enormous sum of money to a German travel company. Seamus Conlon, the man with the endless bag of gold, apparently motivated the acquisition saying that "we wanted the top positions so that when Internet users are searching for deals... we are the first port of call."

Owning both the singular and the plural of an Internet domain can't have been Seamus' dream as a kid, but he made it big time and he'll probably be remembered by many people for this. Of course, if we are to count the amount of dollars per letter, the winner would clearly be sex.com, which sold back in 2005 for 12 million bucks, giving it a nice round 4 mil to boot. Second is porn.com (I'm starting to see a pattern here) that booked some 9.5 million and 2.35 mil per letter.

Nevertheless, $1.1 million is a record for Britain, almost four times bigger than the previous $300,000 bagged by a domain last October.