Do you have 3 billion dollars lying around for Cars.com?

Good domain names are still sought after. Several domains were recently sold to new owners for substantial amounts of money. But is 3 billion dollars really a reasonable amount? Or is this just a symptom of a new Internet bubble?

When you have an idea for a good domain name and if you are fast enough, you can do a roaring trade. At least, that was so in the early days of the Internet. Smart investors who registered a domain at that time seemed to have found a real gold mine. Domain names switched owners and continued to increase in value. Some of them even reached astronomical amounts. Famous examples are sex.com, which was sold in November 2010 for 13 million dollars, and Porn.com, which switched owners for $9.5 million – amounts that, even without thinking about the content of these websites, would make you blush.

These incredibly high amounts of money, which are naturally interesting for investors, made it almost impossible for ordinary entrepreneurs to find a catchy domain name. And this is one of the reasons why ICANN decided to create the new generic Top-Level Domains, so that start-ups from all around the world could get a chance to create their own identity on the web.

And, apparently, countless companies are now seizing this opportunity. Some new extensions that have already been made available to the public at large seem to be extremely popular. Like .GURU, for instance – a gTLD that owes its appeal to both its shortness (4 letters) and its charm. More than 40,000 .GURU domain names have already been registered. After all, who wouldn’t like to be a guru in his field? Among the new gTLDs are many other promising extensions that could very well bring in huge sums of money in the future. Extensions like .tips, .fun and .law will immediately fire your imagination.

And yet, the big money is still spent on ordinary domain names. Apartments.com is probably the best example: this domain name was sold last week for no less than $585 million! Apartments.com was originally launched as an online counterpart to real estate print ads. Its owner, Classified Ventures, has another interesting domain name in its portfolio: Cars.com. And the company now wants to sell it and hopes to get quite a good price for it: $3 billion!

Is this unrealistic? Not really. According to various sources, Cars.com generates an annual turnover of $400-$500 million. Observers believe that a new owner could easily boost this turnover by an additional $200 million. The one who will actually spend those $3 billion would get a return on his investment in just a few years. So… anybody interested?

In any case, the story has a moral: good domain names will always be a good investment. And with the new gTLDs that are currently being launched, opportunities will be available to all. All you need to do is come up with a good idea. If you want to get inspired, you can check out the different gTLDs that are coming: Combell made a list of the new gTLDs for you and sorted them into categories for more convenience.