Yahoo Is Now Resorting To Selling Killer Domain Names On The Cheap

by editor on Jun.17, 2009, under TechCrunch

No sooner do we finish writing up Yahoo deadpooling yep another project, Gallery, do we get a tip that Yahoo apparently has another money saving/making plan: Selling off domains it owns. That’s exactly what it has done with contests.com, which sold during a live auction last night.

What’s really odd though (aside from an Internet giant actually selling a domain rather than buying one), is the price at which it sold. Contests.com is a killer domain name. People like my mother love nothing more than going online and searching for contests to enter to win stuff. But what’s crazy is that Yahoo sold it for only $380,000.

Let’s put that in some perspective. In February, Toys.com sold for $5.1 million in auction. Sure, that’s a better domain, but not over 10 times better. And a few weeks ago, Candy.com sold for $3 million.

How Yahoo failed to secure even a million for the name is beyond me. Just poor luck in the auction? This guy, who apparently left right before the auction started last night is flabbergasted as well.

I just really would like to know why Yahoo would even sell it in the first place? I know times are tough at Yahoo but is $380K really going to help much in the long run? No. Hell, it’d probably be better to keep the domain and just put a load of ads on it, perhaps even Google ads. Or, I don’t know, run some Yahoo contests on it. People on the web love that stuff, I hear.

[photo: flickr/.larry page]

[thanks Sahar]

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