HomeAway CEO: VacationRentals.com Domain Name Bought for $35 Million

I read a report on The Next Web this morining, and it listed the sale of VacationRentals.com as the most expensive domain name sale of all time. I don’t recall hearing about the sale anywhere, but the embedded video confirms the sale price.

In the video, HomeAway Founder and CEO Brian Sharples mentions that the company primarily bought VacationRentals.com to keep it away from a competitor. From the looks of it, VacationRentals.com had been a very active website before the acquisition, although Mr. Sharples sounds like the purchase was a defensive measure primarily for the domain name: “The only reason we bought it was so Expedia couldn’t have that url.” (Start the video at about the 15 minute mark to hear it).

I am sure most people won’t update their list of the most expensive domain sales / purchases of all time, but it certainly is a big sale that should be noted.

Interestingly, TNW did not include the $35.6 million sale of Insurance.com or the $16 million sale of Insure.com. From my perspective, both of these domain sales are similar in nature to the sale of VacationRentals.com since they were active websites and weren’t exclusively domain sales.

Public Biotechnology Company Buys Cancer Vaccine Domain Names

In the most recent DNJournal weekly domain sales report, Ron Jackson reported the sale of two cancer vaccine domain names: CancerVaccine.org sold for $18,000 and CancerVaccine.net sold for $10,000. According to the updated Whois records for both domain names, the company that acquired them is a publicly traded pharmaceutical company called Northwest Biotherapeutics (Stock symbol: NWBO).

Additional research led me to find that the company also acquired CancerVaccine.com as well. Up until August 1, the domain name was owned under privacy protection at Moniker, but the Whois lookup is now showing that it is owned by  Northwest Biotherapeutics at Go Daddy. Prior to its privacy protection in late 2012, it was owned by a domain investor in New Jersey.  It is possible the company had owned it at that point, and the privacy was removed after the transfer.

At the moment, it does not

Back At It

I took a little over a week off and went on vacation. I had scheduled several posts for while I was gone, and you probably didn’t even miss me!

I have a number of comments in the moderation queue and a ton of them in the spam filter, so I’ll be going through those later tonight and tomorrow. If your comment isn’t approved by tomorrow, please let me know so I can look into it. Sometimes it’s more efficient to simply delete all spam comments and hope nothing important was lost, but I’ll do a cursory check in the meantime.

If you’ve emailed me in the last week and a half, I will do my best to get back to you within a couple of days. If you’re trying to sell me a domain name and I didn’t reply, it probably means I have no interest in the name and haven’t had the chance to reply. If you’re looking for a domain broker, I don’t broker names, so you can have a look at a list of domain brokers. If you’re looking for domain consulting, my apologies, but I don’t do that either.

This was the first vacation I’ve had where I did almost no work. I checked email just a bit and tried to disconnect as much as possible. It was nice at the time, but I’m now playing catch up. Thanks for understanding.

5 Domain Investing Risks

I was speaking about investing in domain names with my wife’s cousin in an attempt to give a very general overview of what I do and the business of domain investing. He is a finance professional, and one of the questions he asked was about the risks associated with domain investing.

I thought it was an interesting topic, so I’ll share and discuss what I think are the greatest risks to investing in domain names, and I welcome you to share your thoughts on these risks and to add other risks that exist that I missed. These risks are in no particular order, and they may pertain more to my business than to yours. Whatever the case is, I welcome your thoughts.

Risks of Domain Investing:

Disclaimer About Advertisers

I read Ray’s post on Hybrid Domainer  today, and think it’s worth a read when you have a chance. There are a number of companies advertising on my blog, and I want to touch on Ray’s article a bit and give a bit of a disclaimer, in addition to the disclaimer I have on my blog already.

In order to be able to spend the time sharing information at no cost to readers, I need to have advertisments. No offense, but I am not going to spend 30+ hours a week on my blog if I am not earning revenue from it. If I was going to spend that much time without being paid, I’d be volunteering at a non-profit organization and not writing articles to help others make money from domain investing. I enjoy writing and sharing, but if there’s no financial incentive, the time would be more wisely spent managing and operating my domain investment business, not helping others build theirs at the expense of mine.

That said, we are in a niche business. There aren’t hundreds of companies

Advantages & Disadvantages of Domain Industry Jobs

From time to time, I will post a job opening or two at a domain industry company. Some of these job opportunities are at domain brokerages, some are at parking companies, some are at domain registrars, and others are at companies that operate in the domain investment space.

For someone who wants to work in this space, there are a number of advantages and disadvantages to getting a job for a domain industry company, and I’ll share my thoughts with you. As always, you are welcome to share your thoughts as well, and if you work (or have worked) for an industry company, you can tell me if I am right or wrong.