Now I didn’t intend to do two days with back-to-back blog posts about .UK, especially since I intend on buying zero .UK domains…but here we are, and it’s happening.
Today Jag Singh posted the following on Twitter:

Converting that to USD the final sale price comes out to $25,466. The domain sold through DomainLore.uk a marketplace focused on .UK domains that I honestly hadn’t heard of until today.
Looking at the site it seems that they have a lot of bidding activity on a whole range of .UK domains with names like Insure.uk already exceeding $5,000 USD.
One of my readers Snoopy, shared some interesting insights on .UK domains in the comment section yesterday:

The last sentence stuck with me. It’s not like .UK is new, it’s been out for five years and still .CO.UK seems to be the overwhelmingly popular choice. So why now would .UK become so valuable?
Looking on NameBio, the highest recorded .CO.UK domain is Cruises.co.uk which went for $1.09M, followed by Furniture.co.uk for $650,000. For .UK on the other hand, the highest recorded sale is Campings.uk $12,675. Why anyone would pay so much for the key word “campings” is actually baffling to me but the point is, today’s sale of Gay.uk was 2x the highest reported .UK sale.
My initial thought is that there’s too much hype about .UK and it’s causing people to do foolish things, i.e. overpay for domains that they’re never going to be able to sell for a profit.
That being said, as these sales continue it’s going to create a whole new set of comps, the question is – does that make a difference? I’m still staying away from .UK domains myself, but I’ll be keeping a close eye on the sales data because this is officially getting interesting.

.co.uk sales have been diminished in recent years because .uk was on the horizon, with the extension threatening to rival or overtake .co.uk in the long-run. Conversely, .uk sales have been low because it was not widely used yet and was adopted by .co.uk owners, so not much aftermarket activity since 2014. The full rollout just took place and now it’s new ballgame. Right now, not much going on, just speculation. But five, ten years down the road, that’s a different story. .uk is very well-positioned to grow in market share, mind share, and usage. Accordingly, values will be higher.
You make calculated risks based on the set of facts before you. Nothing is guaranteed. But if it makes sense, go for it. And some people are going for it.