It's not only real estate that's experiencing another boom in the UAE, it seems that virtual property is also back in demand. As The National reported yesterday, a British man has sold the abudha.bi domain name – to a buyer in Dubai – for "well above" its asking price of Dh12,000.
The sale is reminiscent of the initial “dot-com landrush”, when domain names were selling for enormous prices – hotels.com fetched $11 million (Dh2.99m) in 2001 – and so-called cybersquatters were pouncing on names they thought would be valuable. The strategy has had mixed success, because some celebrities, including Madonna, have successfully taken legal action to claim their dot-com names as intellectual property.
While the trade remains buoyant – as recently as 2010, Facebook paid $8.5m to secure fb.com – large windfalls for sellers are the exception.
The name abudha.bi, which employs the country code for the African nation of Burundi, would not seem to be especially relevant to the UAE, which has its own .ae signifier. It’s also counterintuitive to the modern practice of searching for information rather than typing in web addresses.
In any case, the true value of any name lies in the strength of the brand behind it, not an unusual online identifier. And Abu Dhabi, the city and emirate, needs no help in that department.
