What credit crunch? Toys.com domain sells for $5m

newsguy 0 357 Views

Crikey! And there I was thinking we were slap bang in the middle of a global recession. Things can't be that bad, I guess, if a retailer can find $5.1 million to pay for a new domain name. Yet that is exactly what Toys R Us has paid out in order purchase the domain, making it the biggest earner in the online name market so far this year.

Of course, it is not a record breaker as such. If you want to be involved in the real domain gold rush then you need a generic name associated with the adult industry which is probably why in years past porn.com has made $9.5 million and the big daddy of them all, , went for a massive $14 million a couple of years ago before the credit crunch hit.

The BBC quotes Ron Jackson from the Domain Name Journal as confirming the average sales price for a .com as being $2,688, down a hundred bucks from a year earlier.

Toys.com sold for a little more than that when it was auctioned previously, with the seller paying an impressive $1.25 million. Looks like that was one investment that the banks couldn't screw up then.

Dani AI

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As noted, the Toys.com sale looks startling when the economy felt fragile — but it did happen. Toys “R” Us won the re-auction for Toys.com with a $5.1 million bid in February 2009, a result covered at the time by domain press and tech outlets. TechCrunch reported the auction coverage and industry specialist DomainNameWire followed the sale and court approval in detail. (techcrunch.com)

That kind of price reflects how valuable short, generic .com names can be: they attract type‑in traffic, carry strong branding and often rank for high‑volume queries. DNJournal (Ron Jackson) tracked the market then and showed 2009’s high‑end transactions and average .com sale levels, and its sales charts list other multi‑million deals (for example, porn.com and sex.com made headlines). These public records explain why strategic buyers still pay up for single‑word domains. DNJournal coverage and sales charts and DNJournal top‑sales lists are useful references. (dnjournal.com)

A practical note for anyone thinking of buying a premium domain: don’t just forward everything to your homepage and assume value is preserved. Improper forwarding or blanket redirects can cause de‑indexing or soft‑404 behavior; Google’s site‑move and redirect guidance recommends careful URL mapping, server‑side 301s where appropriate, and monitoring in Search Console. The Toys.com purchase itself suffered a misstep when forwarding caused loss of search visibility, as reported by DomainNameWire. Google’s site‑move documentation and DomainNameWire’s reporting show the pitfalls. (developers.google.com)

Finally, buying a great domain is only one piece of a wider strategy. Toys “R” Us later ran into deeper operational and debt problems (Chapter 11 in 2017 and U.S. liquidation actions in 2018) and the brand has since gone through multiple relaunches and partner fulfillment deals. The domain helped brand control, but it did not — on its own — fix business fundamentals. See contemporary coverage for the full timeline. and Forbes on later digital partnerships. ()

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