Bought for $30 million, Internet’s most expensive domain gets just 88,000 monthly visitors

IANS

New Delhi, February 15

Call it bizarre but the most expensive domain ever on Web, that was bought for $30 million, receives only 88,800 visitors per month while the third costliest Internet domain name has no registered monthly traffic, a report showed on Wednesday.

The voice.com website describes Voice as “a team of technologists, artists and curators using the transformative power of NFTs to make digital art collectable”.

The company bought the domain name in June 2019 from enterprise analytics and software company MicroStrategy but the $30 million investment doesn’t appear to have delivered much return so far.

Voice.com’s monthly traffic according to SimilarWeb currently stands at around 88,800, according to data by web-hosting provider Hostinger.

“It’s fascinating to see how much money has exchanged hands for specific domain names – the cost of the seven names in the list adds up to more than $100 million,” said a Hostinger spokesperson.

For multi-billion-dollar companies, the outlay is relatively small, especially if it secures your presence on the web, strengthens your brand and provides a good stream of traffic to your site.

“However as this study shows, spending millions of dollars on the domain name doesn’t guarantee millions of website visitors,” the spokesperson added.

360.com belongs to the Chinese internet security company 360 Security Technology Inc, and currently receives 23.9 million monthly visitors, which ranks it as the 154th biggest website in China.

The domain name was bought from Vodafone in February 2015 for $17 million.

At third place, NFTs.com is one of the most recent sales in the top 10, after it was purchased in August 2022 for $15 million.

The site currently contains very little information, but says it is “powered by DigitalArtists.com Marketplace”.

Despite the large price tag, there isn’t enough info for SimilarWeb to estimate its traffic, indicating that very few people are visiting the site.

Sex.com domain name was sold for $13 million in November 2010 from Escom to Clover Holdings after it won an auction.

“The provocative name receives more traffic than the rest of the top five sites combined, with 64 million visitors each month, and it was recently announced that the name is on sale once more, with minimum bids of $20 million,” the report said.

Describing itself as “Your #1 source for financial information”, Fund.com was reportedly sold for $12 million in 2008, although some are skeptical of the figure.

It has since been sold again in 2019, and currently sees around 293,000 monthly visitors.

At the sixth place, Hotels.com is the oldest sale to make the list, and when adjusted for inflation, the $11 million paid for Hotels.com in 2001 is around $18.4 million in 2023.

The site receives the second-most monthly traffic in the list, with around 44.5 million visitors, said the report.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that it took 10 years to buy the Tesla.com domain name (at the seventh place on the list), eventually securing it from Silicon Valley engineer Stuart Grossman for around $11 million.

Today the site receives nearly 17 million monthly visitors, and the company’s market cap is around $630 billion.