.ME of course

A consortium of three domainers has successfully divested meet.me domain name for the new record price of $450,000.00 USD.

The happy buyer Conference Plus already owns meetme.com and has huge plans for the name. Until now the company was best known for providing audio, web and video conferencing services.

Below goes the original announcement by Michael H. Berkens:

I’m proud to announce that Most Wanted Domains has successfully brokered the sale of the domain name Meet.Me for $450,000 in what we believe is a world record price for a .Me domain name.

The Domain was jointly owned by My company, Worldwide Media, Inc., Rick Schwartz and Ammar Kubba.

The domain name was acquired at the silent portion of a TRAFFIC auction for $5,890 back just over three years ago.

The domain will become the 7th highest sale of the year on DnJournal.com YTD chart and the 3rd highest non-.com sale of the year.

Beyond the money, there are some other important takeaways from the sale.

1. It’s a recent transaction.

Some of us older domainers (and it pretty hard to find domainers older than myself and Rick, although it should be noted that Rick is MUCH older) get tired of hearing that we are only successful because we got started back in the day, usually meaning the mid to late 1990′s and are riding out all of those hand registered domains all these years later.

Here is a domain that was purchased just a few years ago in an auction opened to all and for a pretty modest sum.

I believe there was only one other bidder in this auction and the reserve was set at $5K.

The domain name was bought from the Registry who at the same auction sold date.me and marry.me which we as a group also purchased.

As a personal note being involved in a sale with Mr. Schwartz is quite an education even for an old domainer like myself and the power of the word “no” that Rick frequently chats about cannot be underestimated.

2. The buyer is a big boy

There is another line of reasoning that I see in many comments that buyers of a non-com are uninformed or simply can’t afford the .com.

They buyer is a public company and owned the matching .com meetme.com but still felt it important enough, $450,000 important enough, to get the matching .me domain.

In actuality the buyer got a great deal.

With this .com they have locked up the space and is in a position to take there online conferencing business to the next level.

3. The bar has been raised on .Me domain name values, especially the domains with verbs, call to action type of domains as well as other bang on domain in other right of the dot extensions other than .com.

I have spoken about the expansion of the domain space for a few years and people have accused me on on other blogs & forums that I’m shilling for new extensions.

I guess they have ignored that I have actually invested hundreds of thousands of dollars, putting my money where my mouth is.

The only reason we sold the domain at this level was to raise the bar on valuations of other .Me domain names which we jointly and individually own.

Of course it also raises the value of .Me domains owned by a lot of domain investors.

Great domains for the extension, just got a huge boost.

No it doesn’t make a crappy .Me worth more but domain names like date.me, marry.me, love.me that we own jointly as well as domains I own like use.me and text.me are worth more now.

Yes I see opportunities in the right of the dot extensions.

At the most recent TRAFFIC Conference auction we once again were a buyer of a new extension this time .XXX.

Don’t be surprised to see a similar story to this one in a few years announcing the sale of one of those domain names.

Yesterday we saw a .ly sell for $100K

The domain space has an is going to continue to expand.

It’s just not a 100% .com world any more.

Source: TheDomians

Short link: Copy - http://links2.me/~5hT2$Zx

Posted on November 10th, 2011 • Category: .COM, .ME • RSS feed • Both comments and pings are currently closed