14 DAY TRIAL // More often than not, the right domain name can make or break a business. Having the best domain won't help a horrible service too much and a good one will do alright even with a less-than-inspired domain but, on the whole, it can be a great boon to a websites success. This is why domain names sometimes fetch huge amounts of money and why the ones paying them still profit in the long run. The latest big transaction in the industry was the sale of the Russia.com domain name for a hefty $1.5 million, as the Quitura blog reports.
Apparently the domain name was sold through Sedo, a marketplace for these kind of transactions, to an anonymous buyer. It's one of the biggest sales of the year but hardly a record breaker. Insure.com was sold last month for a very solid $16 million, one of biggest transactions in history. Other notable sales this year include Toys.com, sold for $5.1 million to the toy maker Toys 'R' Us, and Candy.com which sold for $3 million. Korea.com was sold earlier this year for $5 million, setting a high bar for country domain names.
Russia.com was owned by NewMedia Holdings Inc., which licensed it to Paley Media, a group which operates several sites having to do with country names. The site itself was launched in 1995 and since 2004 has been offering generic travel information for the country similar to the way Paley Media operates sites like Algeria.com, Morocco.com, PuertoRico.com, SouthAfrica.com, Scotland.com, Ukraine.com, and others.
While $1.5 million may seem like a rather low price for a potentially very valuable domain name, its current popularity, or lack thereof, was working against it. The site hovers at around 9,000 monthly unique visitors according to Compete and this likely had something to do with the low price. NewMedia Holdings has previously offered to sell several of its domain names, like PuertoRico.com for $3.5 million and Scotland.com for $3 million, according to Domain Name News.