Cooking.com Sells for $402,500 via Great Domains Auction

Sedo’s Great Domains auction concluded a few moments ago, and Cooking.com was sold for $402,500. The auction was extended by over and hour and a half as the high bidder continued to slowly increase the high bid enough to hit the reserve price. In total, there were 39 bids placed in the auction.

Once the sale of Cooking.com closes, it should rank in the top 5 publicly recorded domain name sales of the year on DNJournal (unless other large public sales are also reported). Cooking.com will rank ahead of the $370,000 sale of DomainNames.com and below the $435,000 sale of Leads.com.

I believe this is the largest sale via Sedo’s Great Domains auction in quite some time. Cooking.com is a great domain name, and I think $402,500 is a pretty solid price for it.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

11 COMMENTS

  1. Cooking.com is a great domain name.
    Love seeing a domain ending in “ing” selling this high.
    Cooking.com domain name is actually worth more than $400k, low-to-mid 7 figures IMO.

  2. Phenomenal deal for the buyer! Over 30 million monthly broad match searches for cooking. Looks like Hoffman Media, LLC was the seller. They also owned the .net and ,org. I wonder if they were included as part of the sale? Any idea who the buyer was? I know it was a much different market, but NOKTA sold CookingGames.com in 2010 for $350,000.

  3. I don’t think this would have strong enduser interest in the current market, pretty big gamble to buy.

    Would have got 3x that a decade ago.

    • I think there would be some end-user interest in Cooking.com. A lot of cooking shows, fresh food delivery, grocery delivery etc.

      Food domains are becoming more popular. More people are staying in binge watching tv, gaming so they’re eating at home.

      Cooking.com would have sold for more 5-10 years ago, but it’s still a solid sale in the current market IMO.

      • Agree, there is potential buyers, but they aren’t going to knocking the doors down. The name looks a million dollars but is possibly more of a trophy name for the mantelpiece rater than something that will see a lot of interest.

        Where is your evidence that food domains are becoming more popular? I haven’t seen anything that would suggest that unless it is a brandable domain that has non food usage like Carrot.com or Lemon.com.

        • I can’t speak to sales, but there are some very popular food-related websites on great domain names:

          Delish.com
          Mouth.com
          Relish.com
          Graze.com
          Eater.com

        • These are the kinds of names I could imagine a food related startup using. Short, snappy brandable names.

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