The top grossing brandable sale last week was Kiaro.com which sold for a cool $15,000 at Sedo. Not a bad price for a 5-letter invented name. Another 5-letter domain name that sold was Orkid.com but it’s not entirely meaningless as it seems to be Malay for the well-known Orchid flower.

I have always liked 5-letter invented brandables, especially since my first sale as a domain name investor was that of Obria.com for $4,696

Here’s this weeks list:

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It’s not often we see a four-keyword domain name making this list. But last week, CurryInAHurry.com sold for a spicy $9,000 at Sedo.com. The domain name has yet to resolve but the buyer is Pure Indian Foods Corporation, an online grocer that sells organic, Indian food.

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Let’s talk about Jobster.com – a domain name with a rich history in an industry I know well: online recruitment. Jobster was founded in 2004 by serial entrepreneur Jason Goldberg (who later founded Fab.com and blockchain platform OST) to take on the established players of that time such as Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com. The young founder raised a staggering $52.5M in funding for the company and went through a large number of pivots but the startup ended up being sold off to another HR Tech company in 2010 for a fraction of its previous valuation.

The site was neglected over the years and went completely offline around a year ago and more recently showed a “this domain name is expired” landing page from GoDaddy. When I saw the domain name appear on GoDaddy’s expired auctions list I pinged Jason on Twitter in case he wanted to buy back the domain name of his first startup. The domain name never made it to auction however as it was removed from the expired auction list which usually indicates that the owner renewed the domain name during its redemption period. I didn’t think much of it until I saw the domain name was sold for $200,000 via Sedo last week. 

The majority of the Whois details of the new owner are private but there are some hints that the buyer is Dutch staffing company Young Capital. It will be interesting to see what they will do with the name. 

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Only one reported sale closed in the five-figure range last week. That was Bons.com which sold for $14,000 at Sedo. Based on current Whois data the buyer seems to be an online-casino operator but the domain name isn’t in use as of yet. 

TheSite.com was an expired domain name at auction at GoDaddy I was watching. It closed at $8,800. 

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October is off to a strong start for brandable domain names sales with six reported sales in the five-figure range. DollarCity.com which sold at DomainMarket.com tops the chart with a cool $90,000. It currently forwards to DollarCity.net which is the site of a South American retailer. 

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There are two domains on this weeks list that jumped out because of the unusual high wholesale price they fetched at GoDaddy’s expired auctions. The first one is TheGroundwork.com, a two-word domain name that was bid up into the five-figure range. Why would any investor pay $10+k for a domain name of this caliber? A Google search shows that the domain belonged to an under-the-radar startup funded by former Google CEO and billionaire Eric Schmidt. The company was a major technology vendor for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and was supposed to help put Hillary in the White House. This obviously didn’t happen and the domain name recently lapsed.

Then there’s a very similar sale. An investor paid more than $9,000 for the expired ButterflyLabs.com domain name. Why? It was once owned by a Bitcoin mining equipment company that was shut down by the FTC and according to this article on The Verge was named “the second-most hated company in Bitcoinland“.

The question I am asking myself is why an investor would pay such a significant amount for these type of expired domains? Do they hope the backlinks and any remaining traffic on the domain will end up making them a steady parking income? Do they like to own a piece of internet history or they think an end-user that is willing to pay five-figures will come knocking for the domain and doesn’t care about the past usage of the domain?

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