Name sells for $4.8 million — Medicare.com domain
A huge domain name sale: Medicare.com sells for $4.8 million.
eHealthInsurance Services, Inc. has purchased the domain name Medicare.com for $4.8 million.
On the firm’s investor conference call yesterday the firm stated it paid $4.5 million in cash for the domain and forgave $0.3 million in receivables from the seller. The seller was apparently an existing business partner with eHealth.
Although the whois record for Medicare.com has used whois privacy for a long time, the most recent public record shows the seller was Tennessee firm Medx Publishing Inc. This is the same firm that recently purchased the domain name Medicaid.com when the U.S. government let it expire.
Medicare.com was a lightly-developed site, so the firm got more than a domain name. The site was monetized by lead gen and Google Adsense. It was basically an affiliate site.
eHealth will get some SEO benefits from purchasing the domain name. Still, in all of eHealth’s announcements and communications regarding the deal it has specifically described it as a domain name buyout. Keep in mind that the U.S. government’s official website regarding Medicare is Medicare.gov. We all know what happens when there’s a .com domain name to match a popular .gov website.
It seems clear to me that eHealth would have purchased the domain name even without the site, so I’m comfortable calling this the most expensive public domain name sale so far in 2014.
