5 unbelievable "facts" about the domain name industry

Here are five thought provoking, perhaps even unbelievable facts about the domain name industry - and they're all true!

A single individual owns over 200,000 domain names!

This is an astonishing but true story: Dr. Lieven P. Van Neste owns well over 200,000 domain names. He has been in the media several times regarding his collection - and most recently has been making waves with his attempts to sell off his collection at truly fire-sale prices via Afternic and other third party brokers.

The highest publicly reported domain name earned the domain name's owner $7.5 million!

Business.com was sold for $7,500,000 to eCompanies, a business incubator. The company promptly went out and secured over $60 million in venture capital funding, so all things are relative... Note that many sales, particularly high-value ones, go unreported - so this is only the highest publicly known sale.

Technically, you might also consider the $50 million paid by DotTV, inc. to the island nation of Tuvalu for the rights to the ".tv" top-level domain space as the most expensive domain name transaction ever!

There is a top-secret discussion board where key domain players exchange inside information!

For obvious reasons, I am not going to provide details! Let me just say this: the discussion board does exist, and it counts some of the most powerful domain name owners in the world (judging by their domain portfolios) among its members.

Every single 3-character .com domain name has long since been registered!

There are over 50,000 possible 3-character .com domain names (counting a-z, 0-9 and the "-" character). Every one of these has long since been registered; most 3-character .com domains fetch 3 to 4 figure prices at auction.

This is one of the most common questions surrounding domain names, asked on bulletin boards and in chat rooms with almost alarming regularity. The short answer is almost always: "Not as much as you think!" - but there is more to this issue than meets the eye.

Every single "all a's" domain name from a.com to aaa..aaa.com (63 characters) has been registered!

I have no idea who would want them, but every .com domain name from 1 to 63 characters long, consisting entirely of the letter "a", has been registered.

Author: Edwin Hayward - Internet Goldrush