Domain sales on the Internet have become a sort of the digitized real estate. Essentially, they signify the brand and allow for its easy recognition. A memorable domain means a lot for the business, and Forex industry is not an exception. In addition, the domain acquisition deals are often classified but still can be worth millions. Just take the example of Lead Capital Markets that owns the Trade.com brand (read more about Trade.com reviews and ratings here), which domain price tag is unknown. Yet it is easy to assume that it is not cheap.
Considering all this, it would be quite interesting to investigate some of the remarkable domain sales that happened in Forex industry.
Investing.com
There is hardly anybody in the financial industry who has never heard of Investing.com website. Back in 2012, the financial site Forexpros.com purchased the investing.com domain name for $2.45 million. This was a pivotal moment in its history, as with the domain change, the company planned to launch a worldwide financial portal with news, charts, real-time quotes and many more features – Investing.com that we perfectly know today. This was the largest domain sale in the year 2012 and 26th biggest website sale in the history at that time.
Markets.com
In 2010, the Cyprus-based broker GFC Markets decided to rebrand its company to what is now Markets.com. Upon acquiring this domain name, the broker quickly started reshaping its business which has grown to the top tier FX and CFD provider since then. It is still unknown how much was paid for the domain, but we suppose it was quite expensive, especially if comparing to the rumored $1 million that Gain Capital paid for “forex.com”.
Choosing Markets.com domain certainly worked to the broker’s advantage, as it clearly represents the wide scope of its services.
IG.com
Another huge domain sale was the purchase of IG.com by the IG Group for $4.7 million in 2013. Previously, the domain IG.com was used by Brazil’s third-largest search portal iG. Therefore, the UK-based brokerage house along with the NetNames and Igloo.com as domain acquisition experts agreed to negotiate the deal with iG. Eventually, the deal ended favorably for IG Group, and the broker was able to consolidate the brand under newly purchased domain.
Z.com
Z.com Trade, the Japanese broker, got its famous name in the year 2014. As it turns out, its parent company GMO Internet acquired the domain name of Z.com in the deal with Nissan Motors that was worth 800 million JPY which equals 7,107,040 in today’s USD.
In the press release, GMO emphasized that Z.com is a highly memorable name that presents a great marketing opportunity to build a strong brand. What’s also interesting here is that Z.com domain is among the six existing domains in the world with one letter and .com.
