The domain diamond.com is hitting the block—with seller GoDaddy hoping to top the $7.5 million it fetched in 2006.
“If you consider that in nine years, the market has gone up, we hope for a better number than [the previous sale],” says Paul Nicks, senior director of aftermarket at GoDaddy. “If you look at the top end of the domain market, it’s all generic.”
“We are trying to identify folks who are either in the industry or outside,” he says. “Diamond is very versatile. It can also be used for credit card rewards or things of that nature. We want to make sure this gets the white glove treatment it deserves.”
Ice.com purchased the domain in 2006 from Odimo, a company partially owned by Israeli sightholder Beny Steinmetz. According to a 2013 list compiled by The Next Web, it is tied for the eighth-most-expensive domain sale of all time. (Wikipedia ranks it 14th.)
Shmuel Gniwisch, former ice.com CEO, says his company wanted to sell the domain, as it is “slowly getting out of the online business. We sold ice.com about a year ago, and diamond.com was another asset that we owned. We just decided it’s time to sell and the market is good.”
He says the site gets “thousands of visitors each month and we are not spending any money. People feel it’s a destination to start off with.”
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