« Move over IPhone.com here comes eTV.com. The multiple million dollar sale of IPhone.com last week rocked the Apple world. Apple tried to keep it secret that they paid millions for the domain. There are so many people registering IPhone names it is giving Apple and even harder time to police their trademark. Over 4,000 IPhone domains have been registered since the IPhone announcement in January. Apple thought IPhone.org would hold them over but then they bent to the demand of the tens of thousands of visitors each day which thought Apple’s IPhone information would be at www.IPhone.com website. It is impossible to launch a brand now days without having the dot com. Apple was forced by all the built in branding of dot com to go buy the generic domain.
eTV.com is just like iPhone.com. It will one day be a product, the question is not IF, but WHEN. Buying it now would be an excellent move, it is a generic brand that a large media company can bank for the future. ETV.com is exclusively on the auction block at the Domain Roundtable in August. The starting bid is $899,000. We have a strict rule about only having 20 domains in the whole auction that will have a reserve over $100,000. We know eTV is worth at least $2M. The potential branding is excellent. Short three character domains normally sell at several thousand dollars. But when those three letter domains mean something significant the price shoots up. It is like buying a master piece from the sixteenth century. They don’t make any more of these dotcom domain names and there availability keeps going down.
* Tom.com $2.5M
* Fly.com $1.5M
* VIP.com $1.4M
* Men.com $1.3M
* Sky.com $1.0M
Some might think, iTV.com would be a natural for Apple. However Apple was asleep with locking up the I domain names several years ago. Apple will need to figure something else out if they ever wanted an iTV to exist in the future. Although I don’t see Apple as a bidder for eTV. There is too much I branding inside Apple that their own customers would be too confused. No, this domain will go to another big media company. If Yahoo, Google, or Microsoft launch something this would be a natural for them. eTV is the perfect brand for a company to bring TV to people through the Internet. As Standard TV dies a quick death I see that the next incarnation of TV will replace it. Good bye Rabbit Ears, hello eTV.
If any large companies want to buy this future brand asset, now is the time. eTV.com will be at the live auction in August at the Domain Roundtable with a reserve price of $899,000. This domain is not getting cheaper after the auction. We have talked the seller down to a below value price so that the domain can have multiple bidders.
BTW, A Rupert Murdock company swallowed iTV.com and that domain is permanently off the market now. MTV.com has been on the market for a while too. »
Source DomainTools