Domain-name prices rise with economy

March 7th, 2004
By Bob Tedeschi

The dot-com gold rush may be over, but territorial claims still can be valuable. Dot-com domain names are fetching respectable prices again, after more than three years of attracting scant interest.

Names like Truck.com, Beef.com and others recently have sold for more than $100,000, according to Domain Name Journal, a trade publication, while Web sites like Men.com, which offers a dating service, and sites selling pornography like Whitehouse .com are crossing the million-dollar threshold.

The rising prices are helping not only the sellers of domain names, but also the industry that supports the use of domain names. Buyers, though paying higher prices, are optimistic that their investments will pay off.

The improvement in domain-name prices actually began last fall, said Ben Turner, vice president for naming and directory services for Verisign, the company that manages the database of domain names ending in.com and .net and assigns numerical addresses to those names. In the fourth quarter of 2003, the number of active domain names handled by Verisign increased by more than 1.7 million, to 30.4 million.

Owners of Web sites also are renewing their.com and .net domain names at record levels, Turner said.