Domain Name Wire today reported that Yahoo.com has purchased OMG.com for $80,000 at Sedo.com. Yahoo was a buyer this time but it wasn’t that long ago that they were the seller and sold Contests.com for $380,000.
I was checking out "Yahoo Sites" which they provide a link on the Yahoo.com site and it is interesting to see some of the sites they list are on domain names them self but the majority of sites use a sub-domain with the yahoo.com domain.
The OMG! site on Yahoo is currently a sub-domain at http://omg.yahoo.com and is a celebrity style site but likely with move to the new OMG.com purchase.
Yahoo lists all it’s sites on another sub-domain called http://everything.yahoo.com . Once at the page, if you hover over the keywords you can watch in your lower page bar and see most on sub-domains with category killer keywords which makes clear sense if you do not own the domain but a couple that are on there own domain names are only so/so domains are were built brands before.
I am not exactly sure what makes Yahoo use a sub-domain or to use it’s own matching domain name. Some may have been "in place" already if Yahoo purchased the service or they simply do not own the matching keyword as a domain.
A couple stand alone domain names that I can see that Yahoo uses are:
- Alibaba.com
- Del.icio.us
- Flickr.com
- MyBlogLog.com
- YSearchBlog.com
- Zimbra.com
Using a stand alone domain name for a large company like Yahoo! can allow for better marketing for the specific site if they so choose or for breaking the site off as a different business that could be sold by itself.
One thing in common with the domain names being used by Yahoo above, they are not category killer domain names, even though they do own some.
It will be interesting to watch if Yahoo starts buying more single word domains and starts moving other sub-domains to matching domains.
