Mystery Buyer Coughs Up $1.5 Million For Russia.com
Currently an online guide for travelers who would like to visit the country, Russia.com is an operation of Paley Media, a Seattle, WA-based consultancy firm that runs the show for many a country domain name, including Algeria.com, Scotland.com, Nepal.com and Ukraine.com. The domain names are themselves owned by NewMedia Holdings, a company that registered the domain name russia.com back in 1995.
It’s unclear why NewMedia / Paley Media decided to offload the high-value domain name, but I reckon one million and a half dollars is a fair price for a website that currently attracts a mere 9,000 unique visitors per month according to Compete. On the other hand, Korea.com was sold earlier this year for a reported $5 million.
We recently wrote about dominance of number of .com domains and also noted that .com domain registrations were starting to turn around again after a poor 2008. It looks like values of .com domains may be rising again: insurance broker Insure.com just sold its name and corresponding website for a whopping $16 million last month.
Other large domain purchases this year include the sale of Candy.com for $3 million, Toys-R-Us’ acquisition of Toys.com for $5.1 million and the sale of Fly.com to Travelzoo for $1.8 million.