Valuable Domain Name Company.com Reborn As Business Social Network

Back when I began my internet aspirations in 1998 I saw the heavy wheeling and dealing at during the height of the dot-com era. When I hung my shingle on the roadside of the information superhighway, toys.com was 100x bigger than Toys R Us and Yahoo was a 130B company.

Domain names rapidly changed hands and seemingly had no limit on their valuation.

I remember coming across Company.com and seeing the unique under construction page:

This domain is owned by Mike O’Connor. As you can see, there’s not much going on at the moment. The short version is that I got this domain Back In The Old Days, and have been so busy that I’ve never gotten around to doing anything with it. I may yet get up the gumption, but obviously haven’t yet! 🙂 via archive.org

The original owner, Mike O’Connor the self titles Curmudgeon Emeritus dryly writes about his good fortune being an internet pioneer and having the good fortune to create an ISP startup at the beginning of the WWW.

Without going into a huge long rant, my belief is that these “generic” dot-com domain names were (and are) pretty valuable. They’re sort of the Internet version of real estate and I represent the Internet equivalent of a farmer who finds himself next to a rapidly growing city that’s going through rapid boom and bust cycles. So my stupid names (which people thought I was nuts to get) are worth a lot of money (and used to be worth even more).

How much? It’s still hard to say. The market for domain names has matured a lot since the early ’90’s when I got these domains. There was a period in 1999 and 2000 when prices went crazy. My take is that it will take another 3 to 5 years for things to really settle down. Please don’t write me to debate this point. Consider it the ravings of a lunatic if you like. The point is that I’m reluctant to sell right now because I don’t think the market is valuing these names very well at the moment. archived quote.

Times have changed, and an entrepreneur has purchased Company.com and created a business social network site, something the original owner prophesied. I am sure it was a healthy 7 figure sale, which is a stunning creation of wealth for creating absolutely nothing.   It seems they have funding, as they are hiring

You can view the Company.com directory which provides free business listings and a clean layout. This web directory is not as good as Business.com and BOTW.org, both of which offer fully followed links, but it has an unbeatable price: free.

I personally believe .com (and some .net & .org) are like real estate and will have lasting values as investments. Quality brand and dictionary domain names will continue to hold value for the indefinite future.  Google loves dictionary based domain names and assigns them nearly unlimited authority, making search engine ranking trivially easy.  Buy a single word keyword domain, get guaranteed Google love.

Buy well and you can join the relatively elite crowd of premium domain name holders, and possibly retire early and be a Curmudgeon Emeritus like Mr. O’Conner.