Domain Magnate

Answers.travel Sold for $3.3 million – it was first reported 2 months ago, but recently sprung a more heated discussion in sight of the depressing economy and the ridiculous amount for an unpopular extension.

Naturally this is the biggest (and possibly the only) .travel sale to date. Despite the shocker it appears to be true as was reported by credible sources: businesswire, reuters.

Different explanations were proposed, from a ‘fake sale’ to ‘money laundering’, tax evasion et. But I can add that I’ve seen enough stranger things happen in domaining over the last few years to know that anything is possible. However don’t get your hopes up, good domains are still good and bad is going to remain bad..

There are 1,426,613 .ru domains registered in total and 60,491 .su
.ru stands for Russia and .su is the obsolete extension of Soviet Union, which is still being used.

But the shocker is all 3 character .ru domains are registered! I could hardly believe that the first time I heard about it mentioned on NP, but a bunch of random checks show that this is true, most appear to be registered by one company: LEGATO LLC and were taken a month ago.

Personally I think the buyout is quite premature, there is hardly enough reseller interest to sustain market values above reg fee for these and it’s highly probably that they will all be dropped in a year, in a same way as it happened to LLLL.com around year 2000, when one company bought about half of them and dropped them a year later realizing it was a bad idea.

One thing is clear though – this should help push the LLL.ru domains prices up on the market. The current prices for these seem to be around $250 and up.

For comparison LLL.ca domains sell for a minimum of $100 now. Canadian tld recently passed 1 million registrations. LLL.co.uk names sell for $1k and up, there are currently about 7 million of them registered.