GMO Internet Group buys domain name Z.COM for $6.8 million: implications

GMO Internet, Inc.: "Tokyo, Japan – November 21, 2014 – GMO Internet Group, Japan’s leading provider of Internet services, today announces plans to unify its global strategy under the brand name, Z.com [ z.com Japanese /  z.com/en English]. As GMO Internet Group expands its global presence we aim to build our core values and objectives into the Z.com brand... " (for more info, go to the press release link above).

GMO's rebranding to Z.com cost about $6.8 million for just the domain name--the biggest (public) domain name sale of the year, surpassing even Xiaomi's purchase, also for global branding, of MI.com ($3.6 million in April) and the sale of Whisky.com ($3.1 million) in March.

Congratulations to buyer GMO and seller Nissan. Smart deal--both sides. And entirely consistent with Domain Mondo's domain philosophy, see, e.g., Domain Mondo | Company Domain Names, IPOs, Simple Rules, Stupid Mistakes.

Implications: What is most striking is not that the three largest (public) domain name sales this year were all dot COM domain names, but that the purchasers were all non-US buyers: Japanese (Z.COM), Chinese (MI.COM) and German (WHISKY.COM), reaffirming that .COM is the only true global brand among all domain name extensions / Top-Level Domains (TLDs).

It is now obvious that no matter how hard ICANN and its new gTLD registries tried to "break" .COM, they have failed. Also, with Chinese being among the largest dot COM buyers, and Pinyin as a commonly used method of transcribing Mandarin pronunciations into the Latin alphabet (which is used in English and other western languages), there are literally millions upon millions of attractive letter combinations still available for registration in the dot COM extension!


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