Could you sell a sub domain? (1 Viewing)

Company that paid $3.5 million for IT.com is selling subdomains





The company that acquired IT.com for $3.5 million has a business plan that might look familiar.

Intis Telecom’s main business is SMS marketing. But it recently acquired it.com for $3.5 million on a payment plan. It paid $1.5 million upfront and is paying the rest off over three years. (James Booth represented the seller.)

It.com has nothing to do with the SMS business, however. The company is offering subdomains like example.it.com, with an emphasis on action words like explore.it.com and remember.it.com.


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It opens up a very good question and that is....

If you have a super short, ultra premium .ca domain, do you think anyone could be successful selling subdomains?

Good question. Better question is, is it worth the effort? You'd have to set yourself up almost as a pseudo registrar, managing customers, billing and dns for those domains. Its not nearly as clean as a one time sale, although it would arguably be a recurring revenue that with enough volume, might be worth it, but I kinda doubt it, unless it was a more significant yearly price.

And the proliferation of alt tlds has further diminished the value of other alt domain concepts like subdomains. Before the provincial codes were blocked from new registrations, I registered all the provincial variations of some of my best domains too. So I could sell {domain}.bc.ca or calgary.{domain}.ca or variations like that. But I've never sold one, then again, I've never tried. Its the kind of thing you'd have to really promote.

It all sounds like too much work. That's the beauty of domaining, you make a sale, you move on, no managing customers, just leads. If you remove that simplicity, it becomes a regular job. I don't want to hate domaining

MapleDots said:

If you have a super short, ultra premium .ca domain, do you think anyone could be successful selling subdomains?

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Centralnic's entire business model started like that... today they are a registry operator... There's a bunch of other places besides Centralnic doing this, not sure how successful they are.

Super risky, if the owner of the ultra short domain ceases activity, or drop the domain, all sub domain's websites will be lost. If I am remembering correctly, in the early 2000's it was pretty common for free domain services.

And if one sub domain user does illegal stuffs... the whole domain is at risk, isn't?

Lachinoiserie said:

And if one sub domain user does illegal stuffs... the whole domain is at risk, isn't?

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It worked for domains like domain.bc.ca without one domain affecting the other.

still risky. I wouldnt do it neither would i buy one

Co.com is doing this for couple of years now. one word is priced at low five figures.

RedRider said:

It worked for domains like domain.bc.ca without one domain affecting the other.

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The difference being that those provincial subdomains were offered by the registry, each with their own registrant at the registry level. There is no domain bc.ca (its restricted) to take the fallout if someone was infringing with {trademark}.bc.ca. Let's say you owned bc.co. If you tried to sell {trademark}.bc.co, then you might be at risk - as technically you are the true owner of that {trademark}.bc.co domain name.

I guess Sedo got paid to consider domain.it.com as premium!