Comments on: No End Users? GetARoom.com Just Sold On Sedo, Goes To Hotels.com Founders

By: Simply adding “.com” doesn’t make the mark | erblawg

Simply adding “.com” doesn’t make the mark | erblawg — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 12:22:01 +0000

[...] in anticipation of this setback, hotels.com recently acquired the rights to [...]

By: PC

PC — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 05:12:29 +0000

Geo

The tweet on the $30K offer was dated 4/17. According to NameBio the domain didn’t sell until 6/30. If getaroom.com was worth more than $30K wouldn’t it have sold during those two months it sat on that publicized offer?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 04:44:36 +0000

Knowing these founders, it’s highly unlikely they would have paid anything move for the domain.

By: MHB

MHB — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 01:47:44 +0000

Geo

Think your friend should have held out for the $100K

By: Anthony

Anthony — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 00:30:32 +0000

If they are developers and did the code themselves perhaps $600 is feasible, otherwise its just not true. $600 will not be enough to do any sort of meaningful development. GetARoom.com definitely easily to remember and super-brandable. Nice purchase!

By: jp

jp — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 23:23:59 +0000

$600 each investment to start Hotels.com, hmmm. So does that amount include what they paid for Hotels.com, or did they just have Hotels.com, and the $600 each was their cost to launch & develop?

By: KD

KD — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 22:03:31 +0000

I hand regged RoomsByTheHour.Com a few weeks ago.I know its sounds sleazy but a Japanese company says that it’s the norm there.

By: don

don — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 20:30:26 +0000

I think its a fair price, for 30k they could have found a number of similar types of names to develop, they simply needed something that could be brandable to spend their advertising dollars on…whats interesting is that they are attacking the same field, 5 years later (assuming much higher competetion, etc) with a lower tier domain and still projecting 45 million in revenue, curious what their profit margins on 45 million would be…in comparison bankrate.com just announced they were selling and will do about 120-130 mill annually in revenues and own a number of key finance sites, so 45 million is quite a bullseye to send up…so what I am gleaning from this is a nice markup remains in the travel sector, or so the new owners believe…

By: Geo Domain Development

Geo Domain Development — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 19:59:24 +0000

@MHB

Here’s a clue on who sold the domain from my twitter feed:

http://twitter.com/acroplex/status/1545458761

By: Jamie Zoch

Jamie Zoch — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 18:25:31 +0000

Thanks for the story Michael. Maybe this will help wake up domainers to notice the BRANDING value in domain names as well. I know it’s very often over looked and likely hardly brought up in negotiations by the majority of domainers.