What happened to some of the top domain names sold in 2008? The results are a bit disappointing.

Domain - Sale Price - 2008 Date Sold *

iReport.com - $750,000 - 1/29/08
2007: Pointed to Rick's Blog
Today: CNN portal of user submitted news.
Alexa rank: 3,502

Cruises.co.uk - $1,099,798 - 2/5/08
2007: No data.
Today: Developed into a forum portal.
Alexa rank: 128,581 and falling.

 

Porn.net - $400,000 - 2/12/08
2007: Somewhat developed.
Today: Parked page.
Alexa Rank: n/a

173.com - $302,790 - 2/12/08
2007: No data.
Today: Blank page.
Alexa Rank: 904,230

Bookmarks.com - $300,000 - 2/12/08
2007: An abandoned development project from 2006.
Today: Bookmark service provided by NetRocket.
Alexa Rank: 37,754

 

AR.com - $225,000 - 2/12/08
2007: Interesting note about this domain. It was up in 1997, containing only two sentences for a restaurant called "Alice's Restaurant". In 2007, it was a domain registry called "Alice's Registry".
Today: "Developed" into a disappointing Google search page.
Alexa Rank: 514,327

 

Photograph.com - $195,000 - 2/12/08
2007: Developed
Today: Parked
Alexa Rank: n/a

 

FruitBaskets.com - $142,500 - 2/12/08
2007: Developed with all products pulled from an affiliate program.
Today: Pointed to GourmetGiftBaskets.com
Alexa Rank: n/a

 

MaturePorn.com - $130,000 - 1/29/08
2007: Developed
Today: Parked
Alexa Rank: n/a

 

Newlyweds.com - $130,000
2007: Parked.
Today: Parked.
Alexa Rank: n/a

HotPorn.com - $107,000 - 2/5/08
2007: Developed.
Today: At first glance, it looks developed but the links just point to parked pages.
Alexa Rank: n/a

Females.com - $90,000 - 2/12/08
2007: No data.
Today: For sale page.
Alexa Rank: 4,718,264

Spicy.com - $81,000 - 1/8/08
2007: Parked.
Today: Unresolves
Alexa Rank: n/a

4X4.co.uk - $75,360 - 2/12/08
2007: Parked.
Today: "Coming Soon" page.
Alexa Rank: 8,147,325

SEO.de - $70,896 - 1/29/08
2007: Part of a project that went offline.
Today: Developed.
Alexa Rank: 68,919

HelpLine.com - $70,300 - 2/5/08
2007: Developed website for Keynote Systems, Inc.
Today: Parked
Alexa Rank: n/a

Joysticks.com - $67,500 - 2/12/08
2007: Developed.
Today: Developed.
Alexa Rank:  27,925,354

HTTPS.com - $50,000 - 2/12/08
2007: No data.
Today: Pointed to Devices.com.
Alexa Rank: n/a

 

RaceTracks.com - $49,000 - 2/12/08
2007: Developed.
Today: Parked
Alexa Rank: n/a


* Figures & dates reported from DNJournal.com. 2008/2007 screenshots provided by Archive.org.

Comments (8)

Arbel Arif June 14, 2010

I don't like to see a lot of domains in parking instead of development but I like your post Tia ... Thank You.

Aron - XF.com

This is really interesting... good job on putting it together. The summary should be: Development is tricky -- and unless you have a good game plan and developer, you probably won't make a "sticky" site. It's so hard to develop something and get it off the ground. (speaking from personal experience as well). Good blog post Aron

TWood June 14, 2010

I agree guys. It's disappointing to see so many good names parked especially when a big price tag was paid for them.

Peter Askew June 15, 2010

great write up Tia.. I'm like you - always interested whether these large domain sales ever lead to site development.. -peter

Tom

Moral of the Story --- If you get a good offer for a domain take it unless you have a proven track record of successful development.

Mike

I really dont think that marketing people know what to do with these domains otherwise large companies would buy them and do what they should be doing with them. Photograph.com - dont you think Kodak would benefit from the traffic of this domain? My God. How dense are these corporate yo-yos?

702domainer

I feel that the reason many of these sites aren't developed is market saturation. Take photograph.com as an example... To even compete in the photo sharing industry, you need to have terabytes (if not petabytes) of storage and a corresponding bandwidth amount to be able to even facilitate clients. The $195,000 they paid for the name is just a down payment for the entire project. And this is before they even have one person using the site, which is where saturation comes into effect. The big players like Photobucket, Flickr, Picasa, etc. are all well established. Many users have hundreds if not thousands of photographs stored on there and moving them would be too much of a pain to be worthwhile. The three services that I mentioned are quite similar as it is. I cannot picture any possible differentiating factor that a new service could come up with that could a) Give existing users a reason to switch b) Not be duplicated by the big time competitors While big price tags may have been paid for the names (in proportion to many smaller sales in the industry), it's just the front lawn to a mansion. Chances are it's doing well enough in parking so that it doesn't need to be developed. A domain name like Photograph.com wouldn't have a hard time earning $100 a day on parking. That would pay off the price tag in about 5 years, and the appreciated value after that time could translate to a very profitable sale.

Scott Neuman June 16, 2010

Didn't see Autoclassifieds.com on the list. That went for $110K. Went from a live site with tons of traffic down to nothing as far as I can tell.

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