Amazon .Bought All the .Buy Top-Level Web Domains for $4.6 Million
I hope they at least qualified for super saver shipping.
Tech companies with deep pockets just love buying things these days, so Amazon decided to one up them all by buying .buy—all of it—for $4.6 million. Now Amazon is the only company that can have websites that end in .buy, although they’ll probably sell you one after they create all the ones they want. When reached for comment on the purchase, .biz responded: “PLEASE LOVE ME.”
.Buy is just one of the many new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) that are being implemented across the Internet. Because if .biz, .net, and .org have proven anything, it’s that people are really clamoring to visit websites with endings other than .com. So, Amazon got in a bidding war with Google (and two other companies) over the .buy domains and has successfully walked away with all of them, which means that they now control all buying on the Internet or something.
Well, it doesn’t, but you’d think it would based on how much they paid for the privilege. What will it really do for them? Probably not a whole lot unless they can garner widespread adoption of adding .buy to the end of a thing you want to buy in your address bar instead of just Googling it and shopping around. They could also be planning on selling individual .buy domains directly to users or setting up some kind of system where online retailers can set up .buy pages through an Amazon system, but for now, we’re just speculating.
Another thing it does is prove that Amazon thinks the .buy gTLD is more important than Google, as Google was likely just interested in reselling individual .buy domains to users and probably could’ve outbid Amazon if they really thought the gTLD was worth $4.6 million or more. Either that, or Google saw that Amazon really wanted the domains and jumped in just to drive the price up like a game of bank account chicken, which is how I prefer to imagine it went down. “Hey, Amazon wants these dumb domains. Let’s pretend we want them so they’ll spend more money. It’ll be hilarious.”
“But what if we accidentally win the bid? That’s kind of a lot of mone—pffft hahahaha! I’m sorry. I couldn’t say that with a straight face. Go nuts.”
(via Geek.com, image via Luke Dorny)
- Amazon took control of anti-Amazon domains
- Amazon also recently bought Twitch.tv, the online game streaming service
- They won’t, however let you .buy Captain America or some other Disney stuff
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