Rare two-letter domain, OS.com, is on the market

Feb. 15, 2011 - PRLog -- BOSTON, MA – Registering a domain is easy, and usually cheap. For ten or fifteen dollars, you can register a name for your URL, but the problem is that with nearly 100 million dot-com domains already in existence, most individuals and companies are hard-pressed to come up with something that hasn't already been taken. As a result, a vibrant aftermarket in registered domain names has sprung up, with some popular and easy-to-remember domains selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Among all of the most desirable domain names, those that contain only two letters are the most wanted. General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, and LG for example, get millions of dollars of PR value from their two-letter domains. Facebook recently paid a reported $8.5 million for the FB.com domain. Today, long-time Internet entrepreneur and owner of the prestigious OS.com domain, Craig Shrimpton, announced that he will put the high-profile online moniker on the market.

"I've owned the OS.com domain for 15 years," said Shrimpton. "The name has tremendous value and several possibilities for commercialization, and I've decided the best way to make use of it is to let it go to a high-profile buyer. Any IT company involved in operating systems would be a natural candidate, including Microsoft, Apple, and Google. Online retailers—such as Overstock.com, for example—would also be able to make good use of such a domain."

The price of a two-letter dot-com domain is of course, subjective. While the actual cash value is just the price of registration, the marketing value could be enormous. "It's impossible to set a price for something like OS.com," said Shrimpton. "The value is whatever a buyer will pay, and for each buyer, the perceived value will be a very different dollar amount. It could go for anywhere from $100,000, to ten million."

The value and price of online real estate continues to go up. For a company with an online presence, the domain name is everything. According to a survey from domain marketplace provider Sedo, 73 percent of respondents indicated that owning the right domain name is a key factor in a marketing campaign's success. Furthermore, a UK study conducted by MemorableDomains showed that generic URLs that describe a specific type of product or service (such as OS.com) deliver more click-throughs than non-generic domains.

"With domain names taking such prominent roles in marketing success, the value of two-letter domains are destined to increase in value for the right buyer," said Shrimpton. The OS.com brand could well turn out to be the best marketing investment in the domain aftermarket today.

Bids for OS.com are being accepted on Flippa.

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Orbit Data Systems, Inc. is a provider of IT consulting and media services. Established in 1995, Orbit created one of the first Internet service provider operations in the Northeast. Branching out into the IT consulting arena, Orbit continues to provide IT infrastructure and media services.