Anyone for Pizza(.com)?

Sometimes the world of domain names makes me pause. At the moment you can bid on the prime, top level domain Pizza.com (no link, it doesn’t need any help) over at Great Domains. There’s four days left on the bidding and currently it stands at $2,505,000 – yep, a smidge over $2.5 million. Nice.

Where is this going to finish up? I reckon somewhere between $7-9million as it is the most amazing opportunity to own a the piece of internet real estate for a vertical that has regular repeat business in the millions each day. Hungry? Go to Pizza.com and order from your best local pizza place (or whichever local pizza place is paying the most to be there). Easy to remember. Does what it says on the can. The price will be driven up not only from entrepreneurs who can see the dollars (and pounds, and euros) just waiting to be earned, but also from the big pizza players wanting to expand their web footprint and save themselves some serious adword dollars. On that note, maybe Google should be trying to buy it themselves to ensure competitive adwords stay at top dollar for them, but I guess they can just cream the money from everyone else as they struggle to compete with the ‘go to’ direct navigation site for pizza. Now where did I put my wallet?

Addendum: Pizza.com finally sold for $2.6 million, so my estimate was a little high! To be honest I feel like that is still somewhat of a bargain given the amount of pizza that is consumed globally every day.

One Ma.tt to Rule Them All

You have to give credit to Matthew Mullenweg, not only is he the force majeur behind WordPress – the most sensible and elegant blog tool in the word – he also realised that he could buy Ma.tt as his domain before anyone else did… Clever chap.

As a bit of background, ‘tt’ is the top level domain (TLD) for Trinidad and Tobago, based on the sensible logic of using two letter country ISO codes for each country’s domains. This works sensibly around the world everywhere except the U of K, where for some reason we’re stuck with ‘co.uk’, ‘org.uk’ and other various third level domains only. Thanks British domain regulator – you sc.uk.

Anyhoo, in the meantime, you can buy your own .tt domain – but would you want to? There are actually very few words that end with ‘tt’ that aren’t mis-spellings, and ‘bu.tt’ is the only one anyone would really want. There’s also another catch. If you live outside of Trinidad and Tobago then owning such a domain will set you back $1,000 for the first two years, then $1,000 every five after that. A bit too rich for my blood.

Ps, Matt, I apologise for this post still being on Blogger… I promise I’ll move this blog over to WordPress as soon as I get a spare mo.