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 a one page website on Ebola.com. The landing page provides a bit of information about the Ebola virus, and it also provides a few links to articles. In addition, there are affiliate links to Amazon and a supplement website, but I do not have any revenue details. There seems to be quite a bit of traffic coming to this domain name, although the owner is unsure of the accuracy of his traffic counter.
Another Ebola virus related domain name, EbolaVirus.com, is also currently listed for sale on Flippa. According to the sale listing, EbolaVirus.com earned $772 in revenue in August of 2014. That was a substantial increase in revenue from prior months, which makes sense due to the amount of news coverage. This auction has a buy it now price of $22,000, and bidders may place lower bids on the domain name if they wish.
Longterm, I have no idea what the prospects are for these domain names or other domain names related to the Ebola virus. I would assume a pharmaceutical company might want to own them, but it seems that the pharma companies involved in finding a cure or a vaccine may not need to spend too much on marketing given the demand these drugs would have when or if they become commercially available.
I will be keeping my eye on these two sales and will post an update if I see that they sold.
(Full disclosure, I know the owners of these two domain names, but I have no involvement in either sale).
I own ebola.info for a few years now.
I don’t even remember if I knew what ebola was when I bought it. 🙂
Makes perfect sense with the extension.
Trendy and like swine flu can be over before you know it. Sell if someone serious wants to buy.
Domainers are opportunists, put it up for sale when the name is hot, I cant fault the owners for that, my problem is the names, not sure if I would want to own either of these considering that people could be dying from it, Profiting off the ill or the dead is not something I’d feel good about, Donating 50% or a portion to the CDC is something the owner could do, doubtful that will happen.
That reminds me to build out ebolavirustreatment.com. I am hoping it is better to offer the solution than the problem. No pun intended.
What is the solution?
I am sincerely hopping there will be a cure, for the good of many. This is quickly getting out of control.
Me too, without a doubt.
There are many more serious epidemics killing thousands of people. Unless this 1 case in the U.S. spreads and becomes thousands of cases, the media exposure on this ebola virus is to create fear.
This ebola virus outbreak reminds me of the Outbreak movie. Disease is spread via a monkey. It reaches California and infects a small town. If this occurred, then people will start to worry.
Every year, the media engineers a new fear. If a Contagion movie epidemic occurs, people need not to worry. There are much larger epidemics than Ebola. Hunger, poverty, AIDS and other epidemics cause many deaths per year.
CNBC just published an article about the Ebola.com domain name:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/102073711
Seems unreal. That exposure is quite nice. Couldn’t help myself.
You know the just had someone on CNN compare Ebola to AIDS!!!
Seems like EbolaTreatmentCenter.com was registered on Oct 3rd by Dr. Frank Trujillo.
But then again, which doctor would reg 1364 other domains. https://whoisology.com/email/archive_6/trujilloworks@sbcglobal.net
http://time.com/money/3506056/ebola-dot-com-domain-sale/?xid=timefb