The investment arena is everything except static—you can't hit a rock on these grounds without striking gold on the opportunities to invest. Of course, all such opportunities come with inherent risks. But there is one area that seems to be seeing a series of boom phases, one after the other—website domains.
If you're like most folks, you probably look at website domains as your online presence on the internet. But people have long seen domains as investment opportunities. They stock up on domains with potentially profitable outcomes and then sell when a business needs to use that domain name.
Mostly, these domains sell for a couple of thousand dollars, but in some cases, as we're about to see here, they can be worth millions, too! We have handpicked some remarkable cases where financial domain names were sold for exorbitant sums.
You won't believe how much these domains fetched their owners:
Business.com ($350 Million)
You probably know of business.com as the quintessential business search directory, more or less, but that's not how it started back in 1999. Its early years were marred by the dot.com bubble crisis, and consistent profitability was only achieved following major reforms by 2004.
But what's even more interesting is how much the website domain cost. Back in 1999, the founder had to pay $7.5 million to acquire it. The following years brought in more success and outreach, and by the time the owners sold the domain to RH Donnelley in 2007.
The new cost was staggering!
The domain was acquired for no less than $350 million, although WSJ reported that it could've been up to $360 million! RH Donnelley was already booming as an online commercial search website, and this model fits in nicely with their newly acquired business.com domain as well.
However, it is important to note that the transaction was made in stock, not cash.
Insurance.com ($35.6 Million)
The story of insurance.com is a predictable one. It was a pioneer site in many ways from the early years of the internet (the whole internet, not the domain). It did precisely what you'd expect it to. People would log onto the website, search for information regarding insurance coverage, and even buy a policy if they liked it.
The site made profits from selling insurance policies. However, in 2010, California-based marketing company Quinstreet began eyeing the domain. They paid $35.6 million for the deal but did not acquire just the domain name.
Instead, in their own words, they were investing in a "media asset" as a whole and wanted to develop the site and its content even further. Their goal was to expand the scope of the site beyond that of an online insurance agency. Since the deal, the estimated value of the site's traffic, according to Semrush, has increased ten times since 2010, meaning that this domain could be worth ten times its original value today.
Fb.com ($8.5 Million)
Now, you're probably wondering why we would mention FB (and if you're guessing Facebook, you're right, in a way) here. Well, today, Facebook is much more than just a social media platform. It is a one-stop consumer experience platform with profound commercial applications.
Of course, this was not as true as today, back in 2011, when Facebook acquired another domain. This was fb.com, which was formerly owned by the American Farm Bureau Federation. And it's clear that Zuckerburg only wanted the domain alone.
This was because Facebook messages were integrated with the main site. The platform owner wanted another domain for accessing the internal email addresses of their users. Plus, FB and Facebook—you can kind of see why they needed this domain name.
But the million-dollar question is, how much did it sell for?
And the answer is $8.5 million!
Capital.com ($2.5 Million)
Back in 1999, the Capital.com domain was valued at $750,000—yikes! Fast forward to 2013, the site was a prime credit card comparison platform, far from the freely accessible online trading platform it is today. In any case, domains like these were valued at around $2.5 million back then.
VP Capital founder Viktor Prokopenya bought the domain in 2017 for an undisclosed amount. Even after investor Said Gutseriev exited in 2021, the valuation of his stake was not disclosed.
Without details of Prokopenya and Gutseriev's deal, it is impossible to determine the exact value of the domain, so we valued the domain at $2.5 million dollars according to the market price of similar domains.
Auction.com (~$1.7 Million)
This is another pioneer domain with an impressive story. As the name implies, the site served as an auction portal, but when the Real Estate Disposition Corporation (REDC) acquired it in 2009, their goal was to make it bigger than it ever could be.
The deal was sealed for $1.7 million; the idea was to create a consumer-oriented website that simplified lender-foreclosed home auctions for everyday users. Simply put, you didn't have to go to auctions physically to be able to bid.
It seems normal NOW, but this was back in 2009! In the two years leading to this deal, REDC had sold north of $4.5 billion in real estate assets via auctions. Now, they were planning to bring the game online. Their goal was to turn auction.com into the primary real estate auction platform in the USA.
Bottom Line
Of course, the story of multi-million dollar deals for domain names doesn't end here. It's not just financial domains that are worth millions of dollars, and the list goes on with examples from other niches—for instance, cars.com was sold for $872 million, VacationRentals.com for $35 million, PrivateJet.com for $30.18 million, Internet.com for $18 million, and so on.
Even today, domain names remain highly profitable investment opportunities. Investors look for domain names similar to established businesses (of course, the case with FB and Facebook was coincidental) to bargain a good deal when the company shows interest.
While most deals wrap up in a couple of thousand dollars, some can go as high as we mentioned!