Roll up, roll up. Yahoo! is for one week only clearing out over 500 domain names built up over the years – with prices ranging from $100 to $1.5m.
The event, dubbed ‘Domainapalooza’, runs until November 21 and according to Kevin Kramer, deputy general counsel, once the company had stumbled upon these URLs, it was only fair to let other companies use them rather than hog the real estate.
“Surely creative people, businesses and entrepreneurs could come up with something great to do with them,” Kramer noted in a blog post. “They could even spark some brand new ideas or companies.”
MarketingTech has scanned the list with a fine toothcomb, and found plenty of gems.
There are domains with genuine potential: the likes of av.com (reserve price: $1-$2.5m) and webserver.com (up to $500k) are larger elements of Yahoo!’s portfolio – av.com in particular evidently relates to AltaVista, which was snapped up by Yahoo! and shut down earlier this year.
A couple of interesting domains include iporoadshows.com – with one eye on Twitter, perhaps? – and thebroadcastnetwork.com.
There are also plenty of oddities. It’s bizarre to see finalcountdown.com attract a reserve of up to $25k, which may lure fans of 80s hair metal outfit Europe; as well as the peculiar nuggetsforum.com, and geodude.com, for fans of the original Pokemon character.
Also up for sale is blogsport.com, which could be one of many things; a typo trying to emulate Blogspot; a potential home for competitive blogging; or a port for multiple blogs.
There is also a raft of domains which begin with the prefix ‘know’, with topics ranging from dermatology, to breast implants and, erm, North Korea.
So what does all this mean, apart from the newly-acquired insider knowledge that Marissa Mayer isn’t planning a move into the IPO event or nugget game?
As any good business would agree, Yahoo! isn’t doing this as some sort of charity exercise.
This is evidently a quick and easy revenue driver with a lot of real estate the company simply doesn’t need – and it’s interesting to look at something like the hundreds of knowx.com domains to find a project which may have had a lot of time invested to it many moons ago, yet is now consigned to the scrapheap.
If anything, Mayer’s regime at Yahoo! is one of at least purposely changing the company’s image. Back in August the company changed its distinctive logo 30 times in 30 days.
Take a look at the full list here. What do you make of this move?
