Domain Food - Archive - CD.com - the next big domain name sale?

After remaining dormant for the past several years, the domain name CD.com will be put up for sale next week, without any content. This would make it elgible for our "Highest Domain Sales of All Time" list, if it fetches the price the owners are anticipating.

Their auction is scheduled to start August 23th, 2004 and last for a week, with a starting bid requirement of $300,000 and a "buy it now price" of $2 million. Their press release indicates that the auction will be on Sedo.com, although the CD.com website states that pre-registration and a qualification to bid must be established beforehand.

Records show that previous owners included a company called "Central Data" and "Digi International" but CD.com has been parked since early 2000. A marketeer showed up on a leading domain name forum earlier this year and requested a speculative evaluation of the domain name. Feedback was very positive and price evaluation ran high as the domain has both an obvious value to any industry in the music business, as well as a secondary value to any company with the initials of "C. D."
So can this domain name become the next million dollar sale? The owners do claim that people type in CD.com into their browser almost 75,000 times a month. That kind of unadvertised traffic in itself would easily put CD.com into the six digit market based on previous domain name sales, though it also begs the question why it ran for at least four years without any kind of advertising in place to make use of that traffic. Many domain name professionals agree that there was little to fear from a trademark or "bad faith" challange.

Regardless of the value of word "CD" in itself, two letter domain names carry an extra bonus in their worth. ICANN has enforced, since early 2001, the reservation of single and double character domains. Existing ones are essentially "grandfathered" but if they are let to expire, they can never be registered again by end users. Of the 676 possible two letter combinations (not the less valuable "characters" and numbers) roughly 460 remain in use.

Within the wholesale market, two letter .com's will fetch $10,000 to $150,000 as seen on Afternic, notably NQ.com which sold for $27,000 in March of this year and yet still remains parked. From our own list we can see that MR.com sold for $125,000 only a couple of months ago (still considered a wholesale deal because of the nature of the buyer) and made more valueable because of the "MR" significance.

In the retail market, we can spot ME.com selling for nearly half a million dollars back in March of this year (although it is not even parked at this time). The term "CD" is arguably more valuable than "ME". IF.com remains the highest (public) two letter domain name sale to date, having sold for $1 million back in early 2000 to "Intelligent Finance" (a UK internet bank) who wanted to switch from their clunky "intelligence-finance.net". But domain length aside, this past year has been a hot one for sales, "men.com" sold for $1.3 million and "creditcards.com" sold for $2.75 million.

So what will the market bear for CD.com? All signs point to a high six digit if not seven digit sale if there is competition. However we will only know for sure sometime after September 4th.

In reflection, it is facinating to note how far domain name sales have come. In 1996, TV.com sold for "only" $15,000 !

(Please note that while CD.com has chosen to use data from our "Highest Domain Sales" list for their temporary auction website, we have no previous or current association with the owners of CD.com and have no stake in it's sale.)