If you spend $18,000 on a .net.au domain name you’d want it to be good. Most Australians wouldn’t even know that .net.au exists! The one that recently sold is CreditCards.net.au:
Pacific Octane chief executive James Wester sold the domain to Pixel Capital founding director Roland Bleyer, who operates financial products aggregators creditcard.com.au and creditworld.com.au, under the Credit Card Network brand.
Bleyer purchased the creditcard.net domain for $138,000 in September, and at the time, told SmartCompany the company was looking at moving into the American market.
This .net.au sale was made around the same time, but was not disclosed.
James Wester said this morning the sale is only the beginning, as domains will continue to rise in price.
“They’re going to keep rising. Just as 20 or 30 years ago, when every Australian had to open up the Yellow Pages to find what they were looking for, the Yellow Pages made a lot of money and kept raising the price.”
So is it a good investment? Yes, if it is going to be used for a website. These are my three golden rules for domain purchases:
1) .com is king. Virtually any domain name that consists of a regular word or three will gain value over time.
2) Exact match keyword domains should be .com unless you are willing to put a lot of SEO work in. There are dozens of extensions that can compete with you, but if you have the .com it will have more resale value, and more type-in traffic.
3) Other extensions are OK if you are going to create a genuine website (not something that relies purely on SEO tricks or paid traffic). But it needs to sound appropriate. James.me is OK for a personal blog, but James.org sounds wrong.