The Ebola virus has been in the news for the last few months due to the serious outbreak in western Africa.  I think  the frequency of news articles is  only going to increase now that the first case of Ebola has been diagnosed in the United States. I also believe that more people are going to be searching Google and Bing for information about Ebola as a result. With this news, I thought it was interesting to see two exact match Ebola virus domain names come on the market.

For quite some time, I’ve known the founder  of the company that owns Ebola.com, Blue String Ventures. The company  has owned Ebola.com  since 2008. Now that Ebola is in the news even more, I reached out to him to find out some details about Ebola.com, and he let me know the company recently  put the domain name up for sale.  DigitalDNA  is  the domain broker, and the company has not established an asking price for Ebola.com.

At the present time, there is

I just learned that House.com has been sold, with Domain Holdings serving as the domain name brokerage in this transaction. I am told the sale price is confidential, although I understand the original asking price had been $2.5 million, which was later reduced to $1.5 million. My guess is that this was a 7 figure transaction but that is really just a guess.

Based on the current Whois record, the registrant name is listed as Hangzhou Duomai E-Commerce Co.,Ltd, which is a company based in China. The buyer appears to be associated with domain name marketplace 4.CN, as the registrant street address is listed as “please contact with 4.cn brokers.” The registrant appears to be the same company that has been buying other exceptional domain names, including WW.com and MM.com.

The seller of House.com was listed as  

This morning, I discovered that DomainNameSales.com has a translation tool, allowing users to translate domain name inquiries that aren’t in English. Although I have received inquiries via email that were in foreign languages (to me), this was the first inquiry I received like this via DNS landing page.

The inquiry I received was from someone in China, and the translated message was “how much?” It was nice to be able to see what the prospective buyer said to me, but having a discussion with the prospect will likely be an issue for me, as I do not speak Chinese. I suppose I could use another translation tool to compose a reply, but I don’t have much faith in the accuracy of translation tools.

Given the fact that the domain name in this negotiation is

I recently learned about an excellent domain name sale that I am permitted to share publicly. Last week, Koko.com was sold privately for a little over  $100,000. The deal did not include a non disclosure agreement, so the seller was willing to share news of the sale as well as the sale price. I understand that the buyer contacted the seller via the Whois email, and the negotiation took place over the course of a few weeks, all in Chinese. The sale price was 620k RMB, which is just over $100k USD.

The seller of the domain name is iGenesis Limited, a domain investment company based in Hong Kong. A historical Whois search shows that iGenesis appears to have acquired the domain name in late 2005. I was told the domain name was acquired for $12k via GreatDomains.

The transaction was done using