Pingdom Home

US + international: +1-212-796-6890

SE + international: +46-21-480-0920

Business hours 3 am-11:30 am EST (Mon-Fri).

Pingdom Blog

Royal Pingdom

Ramblings from the Pingdom team about the Internet and web tech

RSS Feed

The 20 most expensive domain names and where they lead

That domain names have become big business isn’t news to anyone. It is often likened to a virtual real estate business where millions of dollars are at stake. We were curious to see how the most expensive domain names are actually being used today, so we decided to find out.

Kate Donahue from Sedo was kind enough to give us a list of the 20 most expensive domain names, where they were sold and for how much.

With this list in our hands, we went through all of them to see where they lead.

Domain		Price ($)  Where did it sell?	 Where does it lead?
Sex.com	       12,000,000  Private Sale		 Ad page
Porn.com 	9,500,000  Moniker/Traffic	 Porn portal
Diamond.com	7,500,000  Private Sale		 Online store
Vodka.com	3,000,000  Sedo			 Community
Seniors.com  	1,500,000  Moniker/Traffic	 Community
Tandberg.com	1,500,000  Private Sale		 Tandberg company
Cameras.com	1,500,000  Moniker/Traffic	 Ad page
Scores.com 	1,180,000  Moniker/Traffic	 Scores&Odds
Chinese.com	1,120,008  Sedo			 Ad page
Topix.com	1,000,000  Private Sale		 Community
Poker.de  	  957,937  NICIT/DOMAINfest	 Partypoker.com
NAV.no		  717,978  Private Sale		 Norwegian Labour&Welfare
Dollars.com 	  650,000  DigiPawn.com		 Casino games
On.com		  635,000  Moniker/DomainSystems Community
Cardiology.com    550,000  Moniker		 Ad page
Macau.com	  550,000  Private Sale		 Portal for Macau
Gays.com	  500,000  Sedo			 Community
Wrestling.com	  500,000  Private Sale		 Ad page
Bike.com	  500,000  Sedo			 Ad page
Blue.com	  500,000  Sedo			 Ad page

(Visit these domain names at your own risk. Some contain material that could be considered offensive and/or popup windows.)

Some observations

Out of these 20 domain names…

7 lead to simple ad pages (some of which are parked).
5 lead to communities of some sort (dating sites, etc).
2 lead to casino or poker related sites.

The remaining 6 are a mixed bag of portals, online stores and company sites.

Interestingly, sex.com, a domain name that someone paid 12 million dollars for, is just a simple page with text link ads.

Note: Some may point out that Business.com sold for $345 million, and there may be other similar examples, but the ones listed above are stand-alone domain name sales and as far as we know don’t include an entire business as in the Business.com example.

Not that it is for sale, but one can’t help to wonder what we might get for Pingdom.com…? :)

Want to test your site every minute?








You will get an email with your login information.

In 2010, there were just over 1 million secure Internet websites worldwide. Almost half of those, or 446,992 to be exact, were located in the United States.

But in which country can we find the most secure websites in relation to population? The answer may surprise you.

Read more

No news is good news for the Super Bowl website

The New England Patriots held what seemed to be a commanding lead (17-15) with five minutes left of Super Bowl XLVI last night. But the New York Giants came back and managed to win with 21-17.

As exciting as the game sounds, we missed the whole thing, instead spending our time watching the Superbowl.com website.

It turned out to be a rather dull thing to do because the site held up well and there was no downtime at all. The response time also didn’t give away anything significant in terms of online Super Bowl traffic.

Read more

As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.

Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.

What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.

Read more

Weekend must-read articles #2

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.

Read more

Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.

Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

Read more