Most domainers might be familiar with past sales of “fly” domains. Fly.com sold for a whopping $1.5 million in 1999 and was acquired in 2009 by Travelzoo for $1.8 million. Fly.co.uk sold for $181,042, Fly.co.za sold for $65,000 in 2010, and even Fly.ma sold for over $4,000 in 2007 via Sedo. Domain owners work in mysterious ways, and fly.net is one example.
The domain name expired on March 4, 2010 and is up for auction over at NameJet with a mere 4 bidders and a high pre-bid of $300. The domain itself gets over 1,000 unique visitors per month alone according to Compete and it’s a keyword that is searched globally over 1 million times per month. That’s an exact match type.
Why Fly.net expired, is anyone’s guess
The original owner of the domain going back to 1997, Chris Townsend, also owns slack.net – which is still an active and registered name. Fly.net is a huge domain to let expire, so either Chris Townsend has been slacking on renewals or for other reasons — the name just hasn’t been renewed.
If this name makes it to Auction on April 8, it’s going to be one whopper of an auction on NameJet.
UPDATE: Shortly after we ran this story, the owner of Fly.net renewed the domain name. Although NameJet still has the domain listed for PreRelease, when NameJet refreshes their database today, the name will no longer be up for auction.