Amazon Outbids Google For .Buy TLD, Pays $4.6 Million

Amazon.com paid $4.6 million for the rights to use the .buy top-level domain (TLD) name, outbidding Google and several other smaller companies. The name didn't bring in the most money for those in the auction.

It was the second auction for the new TLDs managed by the Internet Corporation For Assigned Named and Numbers (ICANN). The 1,400 new top-level domains include .cheap and .sexy. Some names have shown little demand, but .buy and .tech will take their place among the top-20 domains that are generating the most money.

Aside from branded names like Kindle and Zappos, the marketplace Amazon will attempt to purchase the rights to use several more generic strings of words like search, cloud, coupon, tunes, video, shop, mobile, room, fire, deal, dev, song, read, like, you, group, call, and mail.

Google also put bids to purchase the rights to use earth, dclk, mail, tech, free, vip, dog, search, family, wow, rsvp, shop, map, you, among other words for both generic and branded.

The .Tech TLD name sold for nearly $6.8 million to Dot Tech LLC. Three companies bid at least $6.2 million for the name, but there were six applications. There were five applicants for .VIP that participated in the Auction. Minds + Machines won the auction with a bid price of just more than $3 million.

"Buy Button" photo from Shutterstock.

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