Feb. 13, 2002 

Resale of domain names goes bust along with the dot-com era
By Reid Kanaley

Timothy Lee prompted some head-scratching two years ago when he said he turned down $8 million cash and $30 million in stock for the "cool.com" Web address he had registered years earlier for free.

Today, for lack of funding, the Cool.com site that Lee, of Seattle, tried to build into a Web community for teenagers is a virtual ghost town. Its assets, including the once-hot domain name, await any interested bidder.

The market for simple, catchy dot-com names isn't what it used to be. Speculators who scarf up Internet domain names -- the part of a Web address after the "www" -- to resell for profit say top prices have fallen about 90 percent since the dot-com go-go era.

Gone is the craziness of the late 1990s, when business.com sold for a record $7.5 million.

An informal tour of Web sites built on some common, generic words seems to show that -- as with cool.com -- addresses are no key to Internet popularity.

Often, no site even exists. Addresses such as college.com, chairs.com and religion.com stand abandoned or unused.

"We don't have anything cooking for it right now," Dianna Ott, spokeswoman for the Presbyterian Church (USA), said of religion.com. The Web address was donated to the denomination a year ago. "We are holding it. We will not release it. We will not sell it. But we don't have any firm plans right now on how we will use it."

And in cyberspace today, rock beats both paper and scissors. Rock.com, which once traded hands in a deal valued at $1 million, is a feeble site with links for entertainment news and an Internet radio show. It is not much. But paper.com and scissors.com are dormant.

Some other addresses bear no literal relationship to the kinds of services or information on the Web sites to which they deliver the curious.

Take fruits and vegetables, for example.

Apple.com, of course, is the Mac computer site. Peach.com is the Web site of accounting software company Peachtree Software. Orange.com belongs to an offshore wireless-phone company. The double-meaning date.com is a matchmaking site.

Those fruits at least seem to be lending themselves to useful purposes. Veggies do not do as well. Carrot.com is an oddball site showing 3-D slide shows (you can order 3-D glasses for $1 a pair). Cucumber.com is an address for sale. Potato.com is dormant.

But there is broccoli.com, which is actually about -- ta-da -- healthy and nutritious broccoli, and how lovingly it is grown and bagged by the Mann Packing Co.

Flower.com and flowers.com identify online florists. Addresses bearing the names of specific flowers, however, are less predictable. Daisy.com is a tribute to the venerable pellet gun. Lily.com is the site of a truck-leasing company.

Details at: http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/living/2666167.htm