Millions of dollars in two-character .COMs just went up for sale

Yesterday, Kira from eName.com sent out a very casual tweet with some of the most valuable domain names in the world in it.

Two character .COMs sell for six and seven figures which makes this a tweet about what could be $10M or more in assets. While domains like xh(.)com and yk(.)com might not sell in the millions, sh(.)com, pf(.)com and da(.)com all feel like they could find a nice spot in the seven figure sales charts.

The top selling two character .COM of all time is fb.com which went for $8.5M in 2010. The next highest sale was we.com which sold for $8M in 2015 followed by ig.com for $4.7M in 2013. The highest two character .COM sale (reported) so far in 2020 is OA.com which sold for $609,068 on Sedo.

Doing a bit of research I was able to find the original sale price for a few of the names they’re selling, here’s the skinny:

  • da(.)com sold for $650,000 in 2016
  • py(.)com sold for $358,000 in 2014
  • yk(.)com sold for $900,000 in 2016

(sales data source – NameBio)

So now the ten million dollar question, why are all these names going up for sale now? Most investors that hold two-character .COMs wait for offers and I can’t think of a time when a group of two-character .COMs like this went up for sale publicly.

My best guess is that when the bottom fell out for 4L .COMs in China, this impacted the liquidity in the 3L and 2L .COM market. While these names are still incredible investment-grade domains, the investor that would have bought them 4-5 years ago, is now going to think twice since they likely know the next buyer will have to be an end-user if they want to book a solid profit. But that’s just my best guess, what do you think?

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton