The domain name Sun.com is owned by Oracle which got the domain when they bought Sun Microsystems last year for $7.4 billion.
Last Thursday, Oracle, announced in a blog post that it “will decommission Sun.com on June 1, and move the remaining content it deems relevant over to Oracle.com.”
As PCworld.com points out, Oracle “could, if it chose to do so, sell off the domain name”
PCWorld.com reached out to Jeff Kupietzky, CEO of Oversee.net, who said the “domain name could be worth between $1 and $2 million”
“At just three letters it is short and memorable,” he said,. “It is a positive word that has a high search volume.”
The Article also quotes quotes Paul Nicks, director of domain aftermarket services for GoDaddy.com who said:
“Sun.com is appealing because it could be used in a number of ways”
“Solar power companies, companies with ‘sun’ currently in their name, domain name investors or anyone looking to leverage the history behind the name could have a bidding interest.”
“Nicks estimated that, should the name be auctioned, it could fetch between $800,000 and $900,000.”
PCworld also interviewed Jason Miner, senior vice president of sales and business development for NameMedia who “estimates that Sun.com could sell for $1 million, if not more.”
The domain has an Alexa ranking of being one of the top 2,200 in terms of traffic on the net and Compete.com shows the domain receiving 1.3 million visitors in Feburary 2011.
Personally I think all the estimates are low.
The traffic alone with worth a fortune as long as Oracle gives the buyer all rights to use the domain free from any trademark claims or better yet as part of the sale assigns the trademark.
My opinion is the domain would sell for well into the seven figures
What do you think the domain would sell for?
Decommissioning and sales of old brands and their assets is a fascinating thing.
The people at Oracle are smart. They realize the brand itself is worth more than the burn-down value of the domain.
I doubt they’ll sell it.
The REAL question is —- what is Sun.XXX gonna’ be worth???????
Its about as good as sex.com, short generic and will be hard to monetize. The long history of sun micro actually doesnt help either.
IMO, it is worth way north of a million, more like 5+
I would add that this is a great domain for Greenspun Media, owner of the Las Vegas Sun.
I think it COULD go for a lot and it won’t go for peanuts. Number 1 buyer IMHO is The Sun newspapers (I grew up on The Baltimore Sun), that is if this newspaper company is still in business. Old media needs to buy more into the web. I imagine Sun.com gets a fair amount of newspaper traffic. Most non tech savvy folks have not heard of sun computers, they just know apple and Microsoft and best buy, and frys.
has HP sold the Digital.com domain?
and, if has sold it, at what price?
well, if HP has sold its domain at an high price, also Sun.com has good chance to be sold
unfortunately, great part of the value of both logo/domains had came from their successful companies, than now no longer exist
The Sun and The Baltimore Sun
yes, offer them the domain is much better that try to find an IT company that buys it
$2.25 million
Unless they can get somewhere north of 100M for it (and they can’t), it doesn’t make any sense to fill out the internal paperwork to make this happen. This company does nearly 7 Billion a year in Net Income.
1M or 2M is probably less than what they spend on paperclips and coffee filters.
These are the same guys who let oracle.net lapse a few years back, so it’s more likely they just forget about it and we see the mother of all drop snaps ensue.
“$2.25 million”
it’s the selling price of digital.com or a prediction for the sun.com sale?
Plenty of end users for this domain with enough $$$ . Ex. Sun Media from Canada
In my opinion, Sun.com is worth $3m – $5m by itself, but if you throw in the trademark, I think it would easily fetch $10m+. Think about the sale of SCO a few years ago or the sale of SGI.
Why would oracle sell the name? It’s not like they need the money
They will not sell. That’s stupid. Sun.com will permanently redirect to Oracle.com.
Oracle doesn’t need 1M. It’s nothing to them, they earn more in an hour.
sun.com and its well known logo may be very useful for a chinese mid-sized IT company to sell more computer and to become more known in USA and Europe
Hello Mike,
Although this is a short name with other good qualities, it has very little Brandability qualities. The name Sun by itself is pretty Benign, and has few branding handles, still it should fetch 1 million in our opinion.
Gratefully, Jeff Schneider (Contact Group) (Metal Tiger)
Jeff
You don’t see brand value in the solar sector?
Oracle servers are still named SUN as the Enterprise OS is called SOLARIS. If that changes one day it would rather make sense to use sun.com for their solar / renewable energy / smart grid solutions than handing it over to a competitor for an amount of money which does not even buy a yacht.
I have to agree with GoDaddy estimates ($800-$900K) and maybe even a little bit lower. I don’t see it any lower than $650K or higher than $1.25 Million. IMO
Ultimately, SUN is a brand trusted by millions. And it is a premium brand. Naturally Oracle decided to keep it.