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Yahoo to auction over 100 domain names ranging from $1,000 to $1.5 million
- theboss 13y agoI wonder how much legacy code can be pushed malware using one of these.
- nfoz 13y agoWhy buy westerns.com when you could buy .westerns instead?
- huskyr 13y agoAh, av.com. The good old redirect to altavista.com. I wonder how much they payed for that back in the days...
- brianbreslin 13y agoThat was exactly my thought. Well is there anything left of the old altavista?
- officemonkey 13y agoWell, there's DuckDuckGo, which is the search engine that reminds me of altavista the most.
- vidarh 13y agoThere's the way the exclamation mark in the Yahoo! logo at altavista.com temporarily morphs into a mountain....
- spada 13y agosurprised not to see broadcast.com on there.
- leokun 13y ago> The company has simply decided it wants a quick revenue bump as these domains have likely hit their peak in value. This is a ridiculous observation given that Yahoo has revenue in billions of USD, and no, selling domains for thousands of dollars will not be any kind of meaningful "quick revenue bump." Tech reporting at its finest right here.
- brianbreslin 13y agoThe few that go for $1M might have some material impact.
- smackfu 13y agoOTOH, it is definitely the kind of tactic a division head uses to goose their numbers.
- elob36 13y agoDid you not read the last paragraph? > For a company that sees quarterly revenues of over a billion dollars, that’s not a big deal, but it definitely can’t hurt either. Reading comprehension at its finest right here.
- jimueller 13y agoThe statement is presented as a fact in the article, yet as even the author admits it is probably not true. So I would agree it is amateur journalism.
- smackfu 13y agoThere's a world of difference between: "The company has simply decided..." and "The company has probably decided..."
- jonnathanson 13y agoTying the sale of these domains to Yahoo's quarterly revenues -- even bringing them up in the same sentence -- is the wrong context in which to discuss them in the first place. Even if Yahoo raises a million dollars from this sale, it'll have no material impact on the bottom line. That said, there are other factors at play in a move like this: 1) PR value (it got the attention of the tech press, after all); 2) the sale of nonproductive assets for any sum greater than $0 isn't necessarily a bad thing. Even if it has no measurable effect on the quarterly results. If I own a broken appliance that I lack the time, financial interest, or skill to fix -- but I can sell it to someone who can make use of it for a few bucks -- I might as well sell it. It won't make a dent in my yearly income, but it'll be better than holding onto the useless (to me) asset.
- jonnathanson 13y agoI really hope the producers of Arrested Development buy finalcountdown.com
- jliptzin 13y agoI guess they're still holding on to broadcast.com. $5 billion for a 301 to yahoo.com, maybe they're waiting for the right buyer.
- jlas 13y agoHere are some that caught my eye: • webserver.com (250k-500k) • finalcountdown.com (10k-25k) • sandwich.com (50k-100k) • airtrafficcontrol.com (10k-25k) I imagine sandwich.com might be a good asset for a chain sandwich restaurant (subway or quiznos, perhaps).
- jliptzin 13y agoMaybe in 1999...but who actually types [thing I'm interest in].com into a web address bar these days? Even my grandma knows better than that by now.
- truncate 13y agoIts not about typing. Its about cool name I guess. Everyone loves and remember a cool name. When you remember things, you communicate that easily and more often. Good for marketing I suppose
- hmsimha 13y agoIt might sense if they planned to base base a product and a campaign on the acquisition. "Introducing: The Sandwich (tm)" That kind of thing.
- corobo 13y agoAs the sly boots behind webserver.io I wouldn't mind that first one.. 250K is a bit more than my standard walking around money though
- gdilla 13y agojumpcut was an amazing tool. I wish they didn't deadpool it.
- smackfu 13y agoA lot of them are good old (noun).com. Those seem valuable at first, but is that still the case? It used to be that people would build a brand around something like pets.com, but now it seems much more popular to create a brand name that is more identifiable and trademarkable.
- jonnathanson 13y agoBack in the day, before people understood how the web worked (or was going to work), those people generally assumed that recognizable nouns would (somehow) correlate to higher organic traffic -- as if someone looking to buy pet-related items would think to type "pets.com" into his URL field. Search engines rendered that logic laughably naive, but I still think there could be some ancillary value in (noun).com as a recognizable and easily recalled domain name. I wouldn't overpay for one, but I wouldn't pass one up if the pricing made sense, and if I had actual plans to do something productive and value-adding with the name. (Buying domain names to squat and flip, under the "Greater Fool Theory," is a game I wouldn't recommend playing.) On the other hand, the biggest non-technical challenge with buying a generic noun as a domain name is trademarking. Picking too generic a company name is setting oneself up for an uphill battle in today's trademark landscape.
- DanielStraight 13y agoRight, so sled.com is probably pretty good, but webserver.com is probably useless. Sled could easily be the name of an app (totally unrelated to sledding of course), but Web Server can't be anything because it's too technical to be useful for anything not related to web servers and too general to be useful for anything that actually is related to web servers.
- tbirdz 13y agowebserver.com could be a nice personal domain for a blog or something, especially one related to http, etc. Though I would agree that the price it's going for seems inflated.
- 13y ago
- minikites 13y agoThis article reminded me how mammals.org would redirect to Apple. I just tested it and it doesn't work any longer. :(
- winterchil 13y agoSeems more likely that Yahoo is preparing to take a write-down on a collection of assets and is trying to mitigate the total amount by auctioning off the leftovers.
- officemonkey 13y agoWebcal.com for $5000? That seems way too cheap.
- richardlblair 13y agoHonestly, I think this is great. Let these solid domains get used.
- staunch 13y agoMostly significantly over valued. They will draw attention though so maybe they'll get high prices.
- pajju 13y agoFellow HN'ers, I had purchased a domain which I'm planning to Sell now. (iAppleService.com) I'm totally new to this Domain Selling business. - How do you guys proceed to find the Right buyer? Can someone share their experience. Looking for help.
- aw3c2 13y agoThat looks like a prime candidate for a lawsuit over Apple's trademarks.
- pajju 13y agoThanks. is it so? Apple's service is very poor here in India. They just don't care for second world countries. And I had purchased this for that reason. I like to give it away, if goes for a good cause.
- IBM 13y agoApple's service is poor in India because they are required by law to partner with Indian retailers to sell their products. These restrictions might be lifting though, I recently read that Wal-Mart would have a retail presence in India.
- sharkweek 13y agoI'm going to be blunt -- that domain is not worth much. It seems to have no current revenue stream, isn't a particularly high value phrase or term, has no existing link equity from an SEO standpoint, and is borderline (if not blatantly) at risk for trademark issues. You could try some domain auction sites, but I just want you to keep your expectations in check.
- pajju 13y agowhy the downvotes? I asked for genuine help in here.
- shawabawa3 13y ago
- betadreamer 13y agotruestory.com sounds cool
- hcho 13y agotruestorybro.com sounds more complete
- chatman 13y agoYahoo is cleaning up the house before vacating it and relocating elsewhere. This is just a garage sale.
- aw3c2 13y agoDirect link to the list of known domains for the fellow "enable javascript to see our content"-boycotters out there: http://cdn3.tnwcdn.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2013/11/yahoo_domains.png http://cdn3.tnwcdn.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2013/11/...