I wish… I wish so bad that I picked up a ton of domain names back in the late 90s and early 2000s! It’s quite funny because I remember how big of a deal it was when I dished out the huge cost of $70 to buy my first domain name through Network Solutions. Imagine how many of us would be mega millionaires if domains were only $10 each a decade ago, like they are today. Ah… we can wish, but it’s only action that speaks words. However, it’s not too late… the domain name business is still huge! Let’s take a quick look at some of the top selling domain names in history!

1. Sex.com – $12 million Originally registered by Gary Kremen, a Silicon Valley software salesman, in 1994. Sold in a private sale for a mixture of cash and stock to Boston-based Escom LLC in January 2005.

2. Porn.com – $9.5 million MXN Limited bought its way into the porn industry in May. Brokered by Moniker.com, the deal stands as the largest all-cash URL transaction ever.

3. Business.com – $7.5 million Sold to ECompanies Venture Group, headed by former Disney executive Jake Weinbaum, in 1999. Yet even the highly prized name couldn’t protect the business from the dot-com bust; the site is now a parking lot for other URLs.

4. Diamond.com – $7.5 million Odimo sold this jewel of a site–along with its jewelry inventory–to Ice.com, an online retailer, in May 2006. Ice.com paid cash for the site and an extra $2 million for Odimo’s bling.

5. Beer.com – $7 million Originally owned by Bill Fisher, a Web site developer who also owned Budweiser.com and Guinness.com. Sold to Belgium-based Interbrew, the world’s second-largest brewer by volume, the site now features racy content aimed at a male audience.

That was a list I made back in 2007… now three years later and the domain market is still crazy. Just this year Dating.com sold for $1.75 million and Slots.com went for $5.5 million. Money.com released a video today on how domain name auctions are still taking place today and raking in big bucks. One buyer in the video walked away with NewYorkApartments.com for only $65,000, then stating he was ready to go up to $250,000 if needed. That’s a huge difference in pricing, which means there is still a huge demand in the domain marketplace, and it’s no longer for just one or two word domain names.

The internet is just get larger every day and there is only one dot com address out there… all the other extensions just don’t cut it. Sit back and watch as domain name prices continue to soar over the next few years… and imagine where they will be decades from now.

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