It's always interesting to me to see companies make a switch of their domain name. Perhaps most fun to see is when a smaller company or startup gains a bit of traction or gets funding and spends big on a major domain name upgrade. I'm going to bring a few of these recent upgrades into focus today. I'm calling this, Domain Upgrades, maybe it will be a new series? We'll see.
DOMAIN UPGRADES
I'm going to start with just a few handpicked domains. I'll list the old domain, the domain upgrade, and the price that was paid to upgrade (if known).
| OLD DOMAIN | DOMAIN UPGRADE | PRICE |
|---|---|---|
| Gab.ai | Gab.com | $220,000 USD |
| FireflySpace.com | Firefly.com | Undisclosed |
| Zoom.us | Zoom.com | $2,000,000 USD |
| OnCarrot.com | Carrot.com | $600,000 USD |
| Mondia.io | Mondia.com | $30,000 USD |
You can see from the above that the price to upgrade varies but can be costly. In general the shorter and better the keyword (actual word vs made up) the more you pay for the premium .com. People that aren't in the domain industry often ask me about these prices. How could a domain be worth that much!?
The simplest way to answer this is to understand that your domain IS your brand. If you don't own your name in .com then you don't own your brand, and consequently someone else IS that brand and not you! When it comes to domains there is scarcity! Think about it, there's only 1 (ONE) Zoom.com in the whole world! The company that owns that domain IS Zoom!
On top of that one needs to consider the amount of money that companies spend on advertising every year. That number will vary but let's consider a low average of around 5% of gross revenue is spent on advertising and marketing annually. If a company has a gross revenue of 10 million dollars, that advertising budget for the year is $500,000 USD! Spending that amount one time on a domain name that is your brand, suddenly seems like a no brainer!