Casino.online acquires Betting.online domain for $400,000

[The Buzz]

Casino.online announced last week its acquisition of the Betting.online domain from Radix for a $400,000 (£330,000 or €378,000).

This marks the highest recorded sale of a new generic top-level domain within the past five years. The transfer was facilitated through the use of escrow.com and the sale was also the fifth-highest domain sale across all top-level domains in 2023.

From Circle ID:

The buyer of betting.online is the same business group that had earlier acquired the domain casino.online for over $200,000 in 2017. As per SimilarWeb, casino.online now averages 160,000+ visitors per month; 34% of which can be attributed to direct traffic.

Businesses increasingly see the benefits of owning a category-killer domain on a new extension because they significantly amplify search engine optimization (SEO), enhance brand credibility, and attract more online visitors.

Speaking about their latest acquisition of betting.online, Patrick Gerhard, CEO of Casino.online said, “We’re thrilled to add betting.online to our portfolio and have some exciting plans for using this domain. We chose to go ahead with it because a .Online domain is a great fit for our industry, and having keyword-rich domains such as these are a critical asset in our brand and vision.”

Betting.online is part of Radix’s ultra-premium platinum inventory that includes names valued at over six figures USD, which the Registry expects to sell directly or through top brokerages and marketplaces. These platinum domains have a one-time fee and standard renewals. Betting.online is an exception to how most of Radix’s premiums are sold.

Read more here: https://circleid.com/posts/20231019-...cord-for-ntlds

[ocreditor]

I wonder how much casinoonline.casino is worth

[gainfin]

As a standalone domain name (not including the current website published to the domain name), it's not worth all that much due to the awkward use of 'casino' twice in the same domain name, which makes it tougher to use as a memorable brand that consumers can easily recall.

Instead, the far less awkward and much more succinct domain name online.casino would be worth quite a bit, perhaps even more than casino.online since people think of an "online casino" before they think of "casino online". Also, consumer searches at Google.com of "online casino" are higher than those of "casino online" so online.casino would be more commercially valuable.

[onlinebetdotcom]

It is expensive but either somebody has a expensive domain addiction or they think this will be a worthy investment.

I'd rather have a branded domain and put $400,000 to content and SEO

[gainfin]

For sure, this sale sets a lower bound of $400,000 for bettingonline.com, which is the superior domain name to betting.online.

Many consumers don't even recognize "betting.online" as a domain name because they don't know that all these new top level domain extensions like .online (and .casino) even exist. More than two decades of hearing ".com" in commercials has made .com the gold standard and consumers expect any major company that takes itself seriously to be using a .com. It's about credibility and trust. Casino.Online can build a nice property on betting.online but they are going to lose a ton of type-in traffic to bettingonline.com because that's where consumers will intuitively expect them to be. They should pay the $695,000 asking price to acquire bettingonline.com to own both domain names and then forward one to the other to capture all of the traffic.