Holiday.com Going Up for Auction

Elliot Silver
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15

Holiday.com, one of the most valuable travel domain names, is coming up for auction during the World Travel Market event in London. The auction for Holiday.com is being conducted by a company called Breathe Luxury, and it will be held on November 5, 2014 at the London Excel. World Travel Market is billed as “the leading global event for the travel industry,” so it makes sense that this domain name auction would be held while the event is taking place.

The Telegraph published an article about this domain auction, and wrote that the “Holiday.com domain name ‘could sell for £21m’.” If that happens, it will be one of (if not the) largest domain name sales of all time.

Here is what the auctioneer had to say about the domain name and upcoming auction on the company’s website:

“Holiday.com has been with its current owners for approximately 16 years and some believe it to be the “Holy Grail” for the travel industry. With many major travel companies battling to acquire Holiday.com over the years, in order to increase their market share, has failed… it is only now that the owners are at ease to part with it.

Here at Breathe Luxury we believe that Holiday.com has all the hallmarks to be the No.1 leading travel brand and dedicated online platform in serving holidaymakers worldwide. As the keyword ‘Holiday’ is so widely searched on major search engines that over 90% of online travel businesses are using ‘holiday’ as one of their top 5 keywords search term, to reach customers online.

Breathe Luxury intends to give Holiday.com the best platform and stage it truly deserves, and where better, then WTM (World Travel Market), the leading global B2B event for the travel industry, It is a unique opportunity for the whole global travel trade to meet, network, negotiate and conduct business.”

If you visit Holiday.com, you can see the same message about the auction that Breathe Luxury has on its corporate website. This is a good move because it’s helping to cast a wider net of prospective buyers. It can also help reassure potential buyers that the auction is legitimate especially those people who may not be familiar with the auctioneer.

Breathe Luxury appears to be the broker for several other exceptional domain names, including Journey.com, NAS.com, Doha.com, Kuwait.com, and several other top tier domain names. Neither the reserve price nor the expected sale range has been released for Holiday.com or any of the other domain names.

I posted a poll to gauge what you think Holiday.com is worth.

Thanks to Jeroen for sharing this with me.

Ingles.com Auction Was Interesting to Me

Elliot Silver
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4

A little over a week ago, I saw that Ingles.com was coming up for auction at NameJet, and I placed a backorder on it. When I initially saw the domain name coming up for sale, my first thought was that “ingles” means “English” in Spanish. As such, I thought Ingles.com would be a good domain name for English classes targeting the Spanish-speaking market.

A few days before Ingles.com was entered into an auction, my family took a trip to the North Carolina mountains for a long weekend. On the drive from the Charlotte airport, we passed a few  large supermarkets named  Ingles. After spending the next morning on the lake, we went to Ingles to pick up some food for lunch, and we went back for a couple of additional things the following morning.

Up until this trip, I had

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HilcoDomains.com Completes First Auction

Elliot Silver
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0

HilcoDomains.com completed its first auction last week, and I have the results to share. The company sold LOA.com for $21,000, LOA.net for $1,000 and Essentials.com for $32,000. Although the singular Essential.com did not sell at auction, interested buyers may contact the company to purchase the domain name privately ($25,000 minimum).

According to Dmitriy Chemlin, Director of Digital Assets at Hilco Streambank, “membership spiked in the days leading up to the auction with a good mix of both end users and domain investors. Both the end users and domain investors participated in the auction.” I am interested to see if an end user buyer acquired LOA.com and/or Essentials.com.

Future auctions on HilcoDomains.com are set to begin in

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MutualFunds.com & MutualFund.com Acquired by Paul Rubillo

Elliot Silver
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13

The MutualFunds.com domain name was the main attraction in the innagural Heritage Auctions (HA) domain auction held at the end of last year. Although MutualFunds.com was not sold during the live segment of the auction, HA’s Aron Meystedt announced that a deal had been reached after the close of the auction, and the domain name was sold in private for an undisclosed amount of money. MutualFunds.com had been owned by Internet entrepreneur Mark Ostrofsky, and it originally had a reserve price of $1 million.

I recently learned who the buyer of MutualFunds.com was, and I also learned the company acquired the singular MutualFund.com in a separate private transaction consummated around the same time. The acquirer is Paul Rubillo, founder of Dividend.com, and he teamed up with a company called Mitre Media on these two domain name acquisitions. According to Rubillo, the purchase prices are both private, but suffice to say the total spent was seven figures. He did tell me that MutualFunds.com was slightly more expensive than MutualFund.com though.

Here’s what Rubillo told me about these two acquisitions:

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2 Chat Names Sell for Over $220k

Elliot Silver
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5

Sedo reported its sales from this month’s Great Domains auction, and there are a few notable sales to report. Chat.fr was reportedly sold for 99,999 EUR and Chat.de was reportedly sold for 65,000. The total of these two domain name sales was 164,999 EUR. At today’s exchange rate, this is approximately $221,872.51 USD.

Several of the other domain names up for auction received bids, but in total, only 6 domain names met reserve and sold. The auction totaled a little over a quarter of a million USD.

Listed below are the 6 domain names that were reported to me by Sedoas sold along with their sale prices:

  • losangeles.de EUR 3910
  • refrigerador.com.br $US 999
  • chat.fr EUR 99999
  • jtf.com $US 25100
  • chat.de EUR 65000
  • characterizer.com $US 99

I assume these deals have not closed yet since the auction concluded yesterday afternoon.

Bitcoins.com Auction Postponed

Elliot Silver
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2

I just received word that the Bitcoins.com auction  at Heritage Auctions scheduled for tomorrow has been canceled reportedly due to the legal proceeding involving Mt. Gox. Coindesk has the full story sharing this news.

I would think this news must be upsetting to Heritage Auctions. The company has spent quite a bit of time (and presumably money) promoting the auction, and I believe the Bitcoins.com domain name is/was the marquee domain name up for sale.  I reached out to Aron Meystedt, Director of the  Intellectual Property Department at Heritage Auctions, and he said that he could not comment on the situation.

All does not appear to be lost for HA though. According to Meystedt, “Once the legal issues are resolved we will attempt to sell this domain name privately.” When I learn about the Bitcoins.com auction in the future, I will keep you posted.

The rest of the auction is going ahead, as planned tomorrow at 1pm Central time. Digital.com has met its reserve at $200,000. You can see the full list of domain names coming up at auction on HA.com.

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