• by Shankar Gupta , August 12, 2005

Mark Twain once said: "Buy land. They've stopped making it." Apparently, the same holds true for domain names.

As part of its liquidation process, At Home Liquidating Trust, the current incarnation of former broadband Internet provider Excite@Home, is selling a portfolio of 119 domain names, including home.net and mystuff.com. One such domain name, shoppingcart.com, has already been snapped up by ecommerce firm MonsterCommerce for $285,000.

Excite@Home, which filed for bankruptcy in September of 2001, has selected Moniker.com, a domain name registration service, as the exclusive agent for all the domain name sales. Moniker.com CEO Monte Cahn valued the portfolio at over one million dollars.

Recently, domain names have been drawing attention--and dollars--in the online marketing industry, because it's believed that some consumers navigate the Web by typing intuitive-sounding names directly into the URL box and hoping for the best.

For instance, online marketing services provider Marchex began acquiring Web properties in February by purchasing a portfolio of domain names from the company Name Development, Ltd. Marchex is currently building out such properties, which include sites like videocameras.com, which has a host of sponsored links and ads from Marchex's camera marketers; yellow.com, which offers business listings from six online Yellow Pages; and friendsonline.com, which has a compilation of links to dating sites.

But it's not clear that purchasing generic domain names will prove to be a good business decision. JupiterResearch Analyst Michael Gartenberg characterized the domain name speculation as a flashback to the bubble days before the dot-com crash. "I guess it goes to show that the Internet is alive and well in 2005," he said. "We're still seeing a re-emergence of some of the stuff we saw in the late '90s when people were willing to pay that kind of money for domain names."

The difference these days, however, is that companies shelling out large sums for generic domain names will be judged by how much money they make, and not how much traffic they accrue, Gartenberg said. Plus, with the proliferation of search engines, having an easy-to-guess generic domain name just doesn't mean what it used to. "Late '90s people did all sorts of speculation in terms of names and paid all sorts of money for a strong, generic domain," he said. "For the most part, we're kind of past that--Amazon is called Amazon, and not e-commerce.com, and eBay is called eBay, and not onlineauctions.com."