Yahoo, which we all know has been cutting back substantially and looking for sources of extra revenue, has devised a new plan to bring in some income by clearing out it closet of premium domain names on the open market. Last night, Yahoo sold Contests.com in a live online domain auction.
What makes this story quite stranger however, is that Yahoo sold the domain for an incredibly cheap price, $380,000. Getting barely 6 figures for a domain name like Contests.com, which almost any 5th grader can build a business plan for in 10 minutes, makes for another embarrassing move by the company.
Yahoo picked up the domain name Contests.com during the $5.7 billion acquisition of Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com , surely there is a major loss going on somewhere in this equation.
MG @ TechCrunch compares the Contests.com price to other domains which have moved in the past year, such as Toys.com for $5.1 million and Candy.com for $3 million. Perhaps the price has something to do with only 7 external liks pointing to the site, which is ridiculous (AND the new owner is now getting links from TechCrunch and other news outlets because of the buy and cheap price) … but the value in such a no-brainer, Yahoo probably could have sat on this domain and gotten more revenue from it down the road, if not from type in traffic alone.
I’m pretty sure that I could have developed Contests.com to be a moneymaker, and I know that some Yahoo staffers in their SEO and publishing department could have done the same thing in their sleep, so why does Yahoo need to unload this domain for $380K right now? Beyond me.
What are your thoughts on this and what would you have done with Contests.com?
