Today saw the release of the premium generic keyword domain Creditcards.net.au. In a furious public auction today this domain reached the .net.au record setting price of $22,002, surpassing the recently announced sale of the closely related Creditcard.net.au which was sold late last year for $18,200. This is now the highest publicly recorded sale of a .net.au for a domain name only. Showing that for premium generic keyword domains a .net.au is still a domain worth owning.
Netfleet was pleased to snap this domain for our client. It will be interesting to see what they do with this domain name as it is a fiercely competitive keyword. Today the top ranking domain for the keyword “creditcards” at google.com.au is credit-cards.net.au outranking creditcard.com.au by three places, showing that “com” is not always king.
A good result, but as with all expiring domains, buyers have less than 24 hours notice that the domain is going to auction, resulting in fewer end user or corporate bidders since raising capital and/or performing due diligence and complying with internal corporate policies within such a tight timeframe is near impossible for them. This means that the only people bidding on these domains are SMEs and entrepreneurs who have the agility to seize the opportunity but who unfortunately don’t have nearly as deep pockets or as great a prospect for commercialization and hence ROI as their corporate peers, with the corollary being relatively poor auction results. I personally have sold two .net.au domains for $10,000 each to different buyers. While a .com.au is preferable, the keyword is vastly more important than the extension, both for ranking and for conversions. Therefore why pay $150k for a .com.au (yes they do go for this privately) when you can pick up the equivalent .net.au for $5-15k. One thing’s for sure: the move to ccTLDs and Google’s focus on local results in the interests of relevance mean than both .com.au and .net.au will have greater ranking value than the almighty .com in coming years. Most developers know this is already the case with .com.au, now we’re just waiting on .net.au. As the extension continues to age and as it becomes more widely used given .com.au saturation, .net.au will surpass .com (but remain second to .com.au) in Australia’s search results. Use of .net.au is rapidly growing, especially among those unable or unwilling to dedicate six figures to the .com.au. One example is the current tv ad for ovarian cancer featuring the domain http://www.ovariancancer.net.au. Exciting times ahead for .net.au!