How successful are the most expensive websites of all time?

The widespread outages around 1000 GMT also hit the UK government website, CNN and the BBC – Copyright POOL/AFP PHILIPPE DESMAZES

A new study reveals website traffic of the costliest domain names in history. This review finds the most expensive domain name ever currently receives 88,000 visitors per month. Remarkably, the third costliest domain name has no registered monthly traffic.

How much is a good website name worth? People and companies have paid hundreds of millions of dollars for specific domain names. Is this always worth the return on investment? Maybe not is the answer.

A new study by web hosting provider Hostinger has investigated the top seven most expensive domain names ever, to see how the sites are doing now. The data, provided to Digital Journal for review, assesses what traffic these sites receive and whether the outlay was worth it.

As to the most expensive websites:

Voice.com

• Cost: $30 million in 2019
• Current monthly traffic: 88.8k

The voice.com website describes Voice as “a team of technologists, artists and curators using the transformative power of NFTs to make digital art collectable.” The company bought the domain name in June 2019 from enterprise analytics and software company MicroStrategy.

360.com

• Cost: $17 million in 2015
• Current monthly traffic: 23.9 million

360.com belongs to the Chinese Internet security company 360 Security Technology Inc, and currently receives 23.9million monthly visitors, which ranks it as the 154th biggest website in China. The domain name was bought from Vodafone in February 2015 for $17 million

NFTs.com

• Cost: $15 million in 2022
• Current monthly traffic: data not available

NFTs.com is one of the most recent sales in the top ten, after it was purchased in August 2022 for $15 million. The site currently contains very little information, but says it is “powered by DigitalArtists.com Marketplace”.

Sex.com

• Cost: $13million in 2010
• Current monthly traffic: 64 million

This domain name was sold in November 2010 from Escom to Clover Holdings after it won an auction. The provocative name receives more traffic than the rest of the top five sites combined, with 64 million visitors each month, and it was recently announced that the name is on sale once more, with minimum bids of $20 million.

Fund.com

• Cost: $12 million in 2008
• Current monthly traffic: 293k

Describing itself as “Your #1 source for financial information”, Fund.com was reportedly sold for $12 million in 2008,. It has since been sold again in 2019, and currently sees around 293,000 monthly visitors.

Next in line are:

• Hotels.com  – Cost: $11 million in 2001; Current monthly traffic: 44.5 million
• Tesla.com  – Cost: $11million in 2014; Current monthly traffic: 16.9 million

Commenting on the study, a spokesperson for Hostinger tells Digital Journal: “It’s fascinating to see how much money has exchanged hands for specific domain names – the cost of the seven names in the list adds up to more than $100 million. For multi-billion-dollar companies, the outlay is relatively small, especially if it secures your presence on the web, strengthens your brand and provides a good stream of traffic to your site. However as this study shows, spending millions of dollars on the domain name doesn’t guarantee millions of website visitors.”