The 2 letter domain name YM.com has been sold by the 44th largest private company in the United States, Advance Publishing Inc. according to whois records.
Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. was the official company name listed in whois records for YM.com, and they are a subsidiary of Advance Publishing Inc. Advance Digital and Conde Nast Digital are all part of Advance Publishing Inc. company.
The domain name YM.com was forwarding to TeenVogue.com for several years but I wasn’t able to find a public listing for the domain being for sale by the company. The 2 letter .com domain name market has been exploding with the minimum wholesale value jumping to $500K with many 2 letter .com domain sales easily reaching 7 figure sales.
YM.com has transferred from CSC Corporate Domains domain registrar to eName and the YM.com domain has been added to the 4.cn domain name servers. I did do a search on 4.cn and YM.com is listed for sale on the site. The whois is generic currently with “domainadmin” and a registrant email address of “8288688@qq.com” for the domain, so the current owners are unknown.
Google Inc. recently acquired the 2 letter domain name YT.com for an undisclosed amount as reported here on TheDomains by me.
Advance owns several 2 letter .com domain names and those are GQ.com, NJ.com, VF.com and AL.com from what I could tell. All are stand alone sites besides VF.com which redirects to VanityFair.com.
Other domain names owned by either Advance Digital | Conde Nast Digital | Advance Magazine Publishers Inc are:
- Style.com
- Details.com
- Brides.com
- Self.com
- NewYorker.com
- Wired.com
- Parade.com
- Gourmet.com
The list goes on and on with great domain names they own!
I was very surprised that Advance would sell the domain name, so the offer to purchase must have been well convincing for them to sell it and was very likely in the 7 figure range? There are only 676 two letter .com domain names with many being owned by large companies like Advance Publishing Inc., so it is not that often they sell.
The seller is in no need for money, so it definitely had to be enough interested offer.
YM.com was surely used as the url for Young Miss Magazine, which used to be a very popular magazine. It was a magazine for teen girls and was the top competitor of Seventeen Magazine. Now that the magazine is out of business, it makes sense to me that the publisher would sell the domain name if they got a strong offer for it. If they aren’t going to use it for their business, and the domain market is so strong for 2 letter domains, they mind as well sell it.
“If they aren’t going to use it for their business, and the domain market is so strong for 2 letter domains, they mind as well sell it.” I totally agree!
My sources in China tell me the person who purchased this name is a Chinese domainer known as “Da Ben”, which sounds like “Mercedes-Benz” to Chinese speakers. I am told the buyer is from Shenzhen and paid $1million for it.
YM.com, via Chinese pronunciation, is also the abbreviation for several other words and phrases like “domains”, “premium domains”, “immigration” and “movie screen”.
I am told this domainer also owns “wx.com” which is the abbreviation for “Wechat” in Chinese pronunciation. If you go to wx.com you will see it’s listed for sale with the same contact QQ address as mentioned in the above news posting.
I cannot independently verify this information from my source, but the price paid sounds reasonable as recent 2 character .coms that are priced in the $500K to $1M range seem to be OK if related to a pinyin brand or a generic word.