Choice domain names pitched as investments

IDG News Service - Forget real estate, the stock market or Internet startups, the new way to make fast money is to invest in domain names, argues a domain name brokerage that will auction off a passel of domain names on Wednesday in New York.

Stocks.com, Rate.com, Quotes.com, Reggae.com, Cable.com, Artist.com, Alcohol.com and voters.com are among the 934 names up on the block at this auction. Oversee.net, through its SnapNames service, will oversee the auction, which it expects to bring in millions of dollars.

While registrars such as GoDaddy and Network Solutions offer the ability for anyone to own an previously unclaimed Internet domain name, usually for less than $20, a secondary market of already claimed but seemingly valuable domain names has long existed. And now the brokers in the field are pitching these domain names as an investment opportunity.

For companies that wish to increase their online presence, the appeal of buying a premium domain name is to "own the category" that the business is in, said Jeff Kupietzky, the CEO of Oversee.net. He referred to how Barnes & Noble owns books.com and Johnson & Johnson owns baby.com. Such names can generate immense traffic just by the virtue of being a commonly used word with an attached .com that curious people will type into browsers.

In addition to targeting companies slow to realize the value in a choice Web address, Oversee.net is also hoping to attract buyers who may not even have business interest in a particular domain name itself. Just buying a domain name, Kupietzky noted, can be a good investment opportunity.

"Domains, really, are almost like commercial real estate. They're investments on their own," Kupietzky said. He called them "Internet real-estate." Purchasers can buy a name with no intent on attaching it to some enterprise, but rather hold on to it, or perhaps run some ads on the site, and then resell it a few years later, hopefully at a profit.

"People could be buying, either for the sake of development, or because they expect to sell the name to somebody else," Kupietzky said. Verisign estimated that there are about 193 million top-level domain names registered across the Internet.

The domain name aftermarket seems to be a growing one. Another domain name broker, Sedo, has estimated that domain name resales generate about $500 million a year, and that the market grew in the second quarter of this year by 38%. At least one investment fund has been started ostensibly devoted only to investing in domain names.

Founded in 2000, Oversee.Net now owns over a million domain names itself. The company developed computerized algorithms to determine which as-of-yet unsold domain names have potential value, by scouring the Web for frequently used words and search terms. "It's much more art than science for evaluating the domain name for the purpose of reselling," Kupietzky said.