Mar 4, 2004 : Demand for Domains on Rise

📅 March 4, 2004 - Domain names, particularly those for flourishing Internet industries like pornography, dating, food and retail, are again fetching record purchase prices, several reports say.

A typical domain, according to VeriSign (verisign.com), is resold for $24,000. However, more popular domains with high commerical value have driven prices upwards and in some cases, resulted in bidding wars. Last week, the New York Times reported that smoking.com was sold for $500,000, mr.com for $350,000 and americans.com for $150,000. According to another report, whitehouse.com, a former adult site which went up for sale last month, has reportedly received bids of up to $2 million.
Most analysts say that the recent upward trend in domain prices will continue as the economy shows further signs of improvement and Web site owners find new ways of driving traffic.
VeriSign recently reported that in the last quarter of 2003, Web sites renewed their domains at record levels of 70 percent, up from a rate of 45 percent recorded for the first quarter of 2003.