A big shift in the UK geodomain landscape took place this week with Christian Phillips selling a knockout set of geo domains to Ian Andrew of DotCom Agency.
The domains were Croydon.com, Dorset.com, EastSussex.com, WestSussex.com, Hampshire.com and Shropshire.com and they sold for $200,000 between them – that’s $33,333 apiece.
A couple of minor geodomain sales have taken place at Domain Lore over the last week.
First Bloxwich.co.uk fetched £141 – which is pretty good for what is essentially a suburb.
The BenNevis.co.uk attracted a winning bid of £351. Having been past the mighty mountain myself a few weeks ago, the area around Fort William and Ben Nevis is abuzz with tourists in the summer season.
BenNevis.co.uk should make an entertaining website once developed.
The ever-reliable Ron Jackson reports that Sedo has sold the domain name Grimsby.biz for USD 1,000.
That’s a lot of packets of frozen fish fingers…
It’s pretty rare to see geo .biz names sold for significant sums, but they lend themselves to local business directory style sites very well.
Which reminds me – I must get on with developing some of my UK geo .biz domains.
Sedo has sold the railway related GeoDomain KingsCross.co.uk for £16,000 to the King’s Cross Central Limited Partnership – the consortium which is developing a 25 acre site around King’s Cross in London.
In the context of that amount of spending, £10k is a drop in the ocean.
There’s a nice opportunity for Welsh speakers over at Domain Lore at the moment.
They’re auctioning the domain name Gwynedd.co.uk – the county has a population of 118,000, numerous sheep, mountains aplenty and a fair smatttering of tourists.
The domain auction ends on 15th June late at night.
There are no spectacular sales of UK geodomains to report this week.
Afternic DLS reported the sale of Darlington.org for $2,988.
And Sedo sold Newmarket.biz for $2,100.
But as both of these domains are registered to US entities it’s possible that the purchasers didn’t have a UK geo domain in mind when they stumped up their cash.
Sedo is currently running auctions on 2 London geodomains.
Paddington.co.uk and Bermondsey.com are both up for grabs with only one bidder apiece at the time of writing.
UPDATE
Paddington.co.uk sold for £1,505, with 2 bidders trying to secure the domain.
Bermondsey.com attracted one bid of £250.
DN Journal reports that Melrose.co.uk has sold at Sedo for £4,450.
As well as being a commonly used name for businesses, Melrose is a famous rugby playing town in the Scottish borders with a population of fewer than 2,000 souls.
In the same sales report Ron Jackson also reveals that DurdleDoor.co.uk sold for USD 3,108. Durdle Door is a rather special geological feature at Lulworth Cove in Dorset.
This is the first sale I’ve seen of such a niche geological feature (as opposed to a regional name).
The domain North-Yorkshire.co.uk sold today in a DomainLore auction for just £60.
While the hyphen in the domain is clearly a bit offputting from the brand point of view, this sort of geo domain generally requires development to get any decent traffic – and hyphens aren’t usually too big an obstacle to overcome, at least as far as search traffic is concerned.
There’s a lot of competition with plenty of sites about Yorkshire already established. It will be interesting to see if North-Yorkshire.co.uk makes much headway.
Domain Lore has just concluded the auction of the domain name Gloucs.co.uk.
It’s a slightly problematical name – everyone knows what it means – Gloucestershire.
But, according to the adwords tool, practically no-one searches on the term Gloucs, preferring Glos, Gloucester or the full Gloucestershire.
This perhaps explains why the domain only fetched £75 at auction, but it certainly has a nice ring to it.