Domain Speculation

Domain speculation can be one of the highest yielding ways of making money on the web but making it happening can take a lot of time and a lot of creativity. There are many approaches to achieing this and we will go through a few.

Let’s start with the first question you may ask. How much can you make with domain speculation? Let’s look at a couple famous sites and their selling price:

Insure.com – Originally purchaed for $1.6 million USD in 2001, the domain name was sold in 2009 for $16 million to QuinStreet, an online marketing company. Insure.com provides life insurance, car insurance, and health insurance services.

Sex.com – Sold for a reported $11 million USD in 2010. The domain is one of the most volitile in history. It was first registered in 1994 by  Gary Kremen, an entrepreneur who would later found Match.com. In 1995, Stephen M. Cohen fraudulently secured the domain by claiming that Kremen worked for his company, that Kremen had ben fired and had abandoned it to Cohen’s use. Cohen would use pornographic advertising to earn approximately $25 million over the course of five years. In November 2000 the domain name was returned to Kremen. The court granted him a total award of $65 million for the fraud that had been committed against him (not surprisingly, Cohen refused to pay anything and fled the United States, hiding in Mexico. The domain was sold at auction for between $11.5 and 13 million.

Poker.com – Sold at the Moniker.com silent auction for somewhere in the range of $10-20 million. Strangely, no one is certain who actually made the winning bid as it would appear the auction was truly silent. Someone was to have allegedly bid as high as $27 million.

Fund.com – Fund.com is the name of a publicly traded Internet company operating in the financial services, product development, licensing and publishing sectors. Based in New York City the company was sold at least twice but in March 2008, the domain name was sold for nearly $10 million to the company fund.com (please don’t ask me to make sense of this).

Porn.com –

Business.com