Rhetorical question, I know :-), but it looks like even there is an international financial crisis, people are interested in expensive domain names.

TechCrunch published a list of very expensive domains after the recent purchase of toys.com domain name by Faculty Lounge with $1,15M in an auction organized as a result of the recent meltdown of The Parent Company.(external link)

There were mentioned domains like YP.com (acquired by Yellow Pages for $3.85 million), Fly.com (bought by Travelzoo for $1.8 million), Vibrators.com ($1 million), ePregnancy.com and other eToys assets ($2.15 million), Birthdays.com, Pinata.com, eParties.com ($200,000 by Done Ventures), Hobbies.com and iToys.com ($102,000 by Domain Equity).

About 2 years ago, I was interested in knowing how much is Whiskey.com. I thought that it worth a lot of money, more than I can dream about and I got this reply:

Dear Constantin,

Thank you very much for your interest in this domain name.
Whiskey.com is for sale together with Bourbon.com. There have been several potential buyers inquiring about these domains in the past weeks. The asking price for the domain package is $2,500,000, but we might also consider selling them as single domains if you can make a reasonable offer.
I’m looking forward to hearing from you. Thanks!

Obviously that was it. :-)

Couple of weeks after that, I have heard about viajar.com (top3 tourism websites in Spain, after Rumbo.es and eDreams.es - was more than selling only the domain name!) that was sold for 20 million euros.

In the same period of time, four “countries” and “regions” were available on domain name market. Iran.com for 200.000 US dollars, Kosovo.com for 200.000 US dollars, Arabia.com for 500.000 dollars and Iraq.com for 500.000 euro.

As far as I noticed, all four domains are still unused. Nobody wants to own a country or an entire region online. :-)

To end this article in a very envy mood, I just present you the most expensive domain name ever. According to active-domain.com, Business.com holds the record as the most valuable domain on the internet. It was bought for a whopping $8 million by the Californian business eCompanies.

Imagine that…