Buying and selling high-dollar domain names is an investment channel I didn't know about until now!
My curiosity led me to create this infographic on the highest prices paid for a single domain name since 2003. The data was surprisingly cagey to come by. There are countless listicles across the web reporting on enormous sales but most of these are unverified and the devil is in the details as many high-dollar sales include the website and business revenue associated with the domain. But what about just the name itself? This intellectual property—which can be as short as 5 letters—can garner many millions of dollars. 

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For this one, I chose a simple bar chart with a web browser interface since the topic is URLs. The nice folks at DNJournal, an industry site that tracks the buying, selling and transfer of domain names, cleared up some questions I had about the data.

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Key takeaways: be careful with data you find on Wikipedia; if you find a good dataset online it's OK to ask its owner questions; top-level domain .com remains the most sought after. And... just because a domain name was sold for millions of dollars doesn't mean it's active and thriving!

 

This piece was published on Voronoi on Apr 23, 2024.

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CHART TYPE: Bar Chart