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There have been quite a few notable financial .com domain names sold in the past few years for large sums of money. I understand there have been  other private deals that aren’t included among the public sales, and there have also been several large deals that involved underlying businesses.  For instance, MutualFunds.com and MutualFund.com were recently acquired  for an undisclosed price.

Some of the recent (past 5 years) notable (and public) financial .com domain name sales include the following:

• Invest.com – $5,000,000 (unconfirmed)
• Investing.com – $2,450,000
• PersonalLoans.com – $1,000,000
• ReverseMortgages.com – $600,000
• Finances.com – $500,000
• Dollars.com – 381,150
• Payment.com $250,000
• Consolidation.com – $220,000

In my article about the reported sale of Invest.com for $5 million, someone asked

Bidz.com was once a thriving online jewelery retailer. I know a couple of people who were regular customers of Bidz.com, although I don’t think I  was ever a customer of the company. According to jewelery industry website JCK, Bidz.com “was second only to Blue Nile in the jewelry e-tail space and regularly recorded more than $100 million in annual sales.”

Earlier this year, the company ceased operations, and it was announced that the company’s assets would be liquidated. The  National Jeweler  publication has additional details about the reasons for the company’s liquidation.

Hilco Streambank has been retained to sell  (pdf)  the Bidz.com brands, trademarks, domain names, and other intangible assets. The company has set a

I thought you might find this video amusing, especially if you are on cruise control waiting to get out of work for the weekend. Jared Ewy of Name.com dressed up like a ninja to help promote .Ninja domain names during the South by Southwest festival (SXSW) in Austin. He (un)stealthily approached people on the street and let them know what .Ninja is. I am sure they were am(con)fused.

.Ninja is a new gTLD extension that will be coming on to the market at the end of May.

When I learned that Escrow.com was offering domain holding transactions where a buyer could pay over time, I was excited. This type of transaction allows a buyer to pay for a domain name in installments without having to seek financing. The one issue I found was that if a deal wasn’t for high five figures or more, it was quite expensive to transact in this way.

According to Escrow.com CEO Brandon Abbey, the price structure for this type of deal has changed, and it is now much more competitively priced. The lower price structure is now in effect on the Escrow.com website, and you can price out a transaction by clicking the “fee calculator” link and selecting “Domain Name Holding” for the type of transaction.

Previously, the fee was structured off a minimum

Shortly after Rick Schwartz announced that his JointVentures.com project was effectively being put on hold, I was asked by a friend if I planned to write about it, and my answer was “no.” I had not participated in it, had only written one article about it (4 in total that mentioned it before today), and Rick had already written an extensive article about the situation, in addition to sending an email to the participants. I didn’t see how writing an article would be beneficial to anyone, and I didn’t think it would serve a useful purpose.

In light of that, I thought I would share insight into what I write about on my blog to give you a better idea of what you can expect to read here. I assume you know the  gist  of it, but I’ll shed some light on my decision making when it comes to blogging. Since I am the publisher, the criteria I discuss below isn’t firm but it should be more of a guideline.