Rafael Sosa’s Weblog

The past week sales for .Info domains resulted in these purchases:

Money.info $22,000

Bakery.info $9,000

Facts.info $2,550

Floors.info $2,470

Fences.info $2,470

Purchase.info $1,050

The interesting story is the purchase of Bakery.info for $9,000. As reported by DNJournal, the name was originally purchased for $1,850 at SnapNames in 2004 and then resold at a slight loss for $1,760 at Afternic early this year. The domain was finally sold last week to a bakery business in England for a $9,000 price tag. This shows a large discrepancy in value appreciation for the .INFO extension.

In the United States, .Info has had a weak acceptance. This holds true for all extensions other than .com, even their own .us country code extension. The reality for Europe is completely different. We can see how strong .co.uk is in England, and .Info is also surprisingly strong overseas. A graph by Grange Project Management (gpmgroup.com) shows a strong adoption of .Info in eastern Europe. Countries like Poland and the Czech Republic have registered more .Info domains than .net and .org. The price of .Info domains is also very well valued. An example is how Czech concrete company BEST, bought Best.info for $20,880 back in 2005.

(Grange Project Management)

Given the large amount of undeveloped .com domains, I see an opportunity in .Info being used to develop useful and informative websites under prime domain keywords. An example of this is the travel industry and how countries are developing their official travel sites under the .Info extension. See Spain and Austria. Private companies are also investing in this trend. Camping.Info sold in 2006 for $28,100 and has since been developed into a large Camping information website for Europe available in 35 languages. It will be interesting to see the future development of equally attractive .Info domains.