With a $2.5M bid in at Sedo, what will Culture.com sell for?

The auction for Culture.com just got very interesting over at Sedo as a prospective buyer put in a 2 million GBP offer which comes out to just north of $2.5M USD.

As of this post being published the auction still has more than five days left which means that the price could still go higher. There was no bidding war to get to this price, instead one buyer put in a single offer that instantly met (or exceeded) the reserve price which means that domain will sell to them if no other offers come in.

Given that California.com recently sold for $3M and last year Ice.com sold for $3.5M I think that $2.5M does make sense for a name of this caliber. Now the question is – will other potential buyers jump in now that they know that the reserve has been met and the clock is ticking.

Strong one-word .COMs have a long history of selling in the seven figure range and once used by a company, the value it brings to the brand is often massive, usually dwarfing the impact that a similar amount of marketing funds could bring to a company.

I personally think as the auction gets closer to prime time we could see a bidding war develop but I think the next bidder will likely wait until the last day to make it happen. In the end, it feels like a price in the $3M – $3.5M range would be reasonable for this name IMO.

As for who would put in such a high bid, I can think of a huge range of companies. This is a monster name and there are a lot of companies that could really grow their brand with a domain like this. I took a look on Twitter to see who was using the Twitter handle @culture and saw that their account was suspended. This means that the new owner of Culture.com might be able to scoop that up as well.

Github has 4,500 repositories with the word “culture” in them so there’s definitely no shortage of software development being done around this keyword. Could it be one of these 4,500?

Right now it’s hard to speculate but I know myself and many other people will be very interested to see who ends up with this name and what it sells for. What do you think it’s going to go for? Is my estimate of $3M – $3.5M in the ballpark or do you think I’m aiming too high? Too low?

I want to hear from you, comment and let your voice be heard!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton