The Top 150 Most Expensive Domain Names

The top 150 publicly discoverable domain name sales of all time are below.

Each year, more transactions occur that are under strict NDAs but the trend is indisputable. Every year beats the previous year for top dollar domain name sales and in the world after Covid-19, we’re seeing more US $ 8-figure domain name sales than ever before.

Domain names are infrequently traded assets that share some of the same characteristics of other infrequently traded assets like real estate, antiques, or art. Inflation drives asset prices up. So does supply and demand. And demand has never been higher for premium, one-word .com domain names.

Although domain names have only been around since January, 1985, their price changes have a show a clear attachment to the general economy.

Economist and internet entrepreneur Thies Lindenthal used real estate economic methodology to provide investors with critical insight into the current market value of domains as a financial asset and in 2011 he had enough data to suggest that domains are as much an economic asset as real estate, stocks, or shares. By allowing comparison to other financial indicators such as the NASDAQ he was able to show that the trend lines for these indices follow the same path as the trend line for the domain market. Using a system he called the Hedonic Repeat Sales methodology (a combination of hedonic regression analysis and the repeat sales methodology) he was able to demonstrate this hypothesis using date from more than 200,000 domain sales.^[1]

In addition to factors mentioned above, Thies Lindenthal also wrote a paper providing empirical insights into the long-term nature of the loss aversion bias using a database of Amsterdam housing transactions spanning 324 years. The purchase price of the house is found to have been a psychological anchor, below which home owners were reluctant to sell their home. This result holds for 17th and 18th century Dutch home owners as well as for those who followed in their wake, but loss aversion appears to get stronger over the centuries. The anchoring power of the purchase price was strong: it survived the death of the original owner when the house passed on to the heirs.^[2]

Bottom Line:

There’s never going to be a better time to buy a domain name or a stock than right now.

The prices are going to keep going up over time.

Nasdaq 100 Index Historical Chart (Source: TradingView)

*Cars.com – Did not trade hands for this amount. The company placed this value on the domain name in SEC filings. They listed it as an indefinite-lived intangible asset.

[1] Lindenthal, Thies, 2014, ‘Valuable Words: The Price Dynamics of Internet Domain Names’, Journal of the Association For Information Science and Technology, vol. 65, no. 5, pp. 861-881

[2] Eichholtz, Piet and Lindenthal, Thies, 2012, ‘Loss Aversion through Centuries and across Generations’, Penn State, Smeal College of Business, https://www.smeal.psu.edu/bires/documents/thies-lindenthal

Page last update May 15, 2023