What does this all mean? Yahoo is willing to have a proxy fight and thinks they can win. A deal between Microsoft and Yahoo is probably further away than ever. The situation is starting to look like a lose-lose for Microsoft. Either they pay up too much for Yahoo and dilute their share price, or after a long proxy battle, Microsoft eventually acquires an engineer/key employee depleted Yahoo at the lower stock price.
Forget Commodities, How About URLs? Written By: David Neubert 2008-05-14 10:27:24
Is virtual real estate the next big investment craze? Will everyone start buying words online? And are financial words/URL's going for more than porn words now? I'm consulting a startup web company right now and buying a name is a real problem. I heard a rumor that Mint.com paid $200,000 for their name. At some point, high prices will drive away potential buyers and the public will become accustomed to seeing more two and three word names for websites.
Numbers like $5 million or more are starting to float around as the price for this web property. I have looked everywhere to see what it actually sold for, but it seems that information is private. I did see a transfer of the name in whois dated April 2008.
For a list of some auction prices, check out this domain auction industry site.
You can recognize a mania when items are being sold for way more than they are economically useful, in the hopes that a greater fool will make a bigger mistake. Just think about all of those empty homes in Florida bought by speculators hoping to sell them to other speculators. When you see a hedge fund set up for domain name investing, it will be time to sell all your domain names for whatever you can get.
