Microsoft bought my H1N1 Domain
 

So this is actually pretty funny, awhile back in April I read a post of GFY where someone had mentioned that they were going to buy up a bunch of H1N1 domains. I thought this was a great idea and purchased H1N1symptoms.com and a few others.

Come October, I ended up selling it for about $2,500 to an anonymous buyer on Sedo. Then I stumbled across this little article today:
http://www.dotweekly.com/2009/10/18/...-by-microsoft/

Apparently Microsoft is doing some out of the box marketing for Bing by buying up domains they feel are relevant news topics. The domain only received around 200 hits a month of type in traffic, so I was more than happy to part with it for that price.

i bet if you knew it was ms, youw ould have asked for more ;)

that's why buyers like to remain anonymous. nonetheless, a great sale!

Great sale and story ....... :thumbsup

Can I get my money back for Winblows? hahaha :Oh crap

good idea profiting from yours by putting it up for sale

MS threatened to sue me about 10 years ago when I started sexyhotmail.com

needless to say I ditched it..

Does not surprise me at all.

Nice change there. Yes when selling domains you have to be aware of the tradenames. I had domain, that was about american express business cards , they sued me for copyright after a year because I was pushing citybusiness cards offers on the site :). I ended up ditching the domain, but I did make nice $$$ during the first year.

interesting. good sale

I love hearing stories like this, I wonder how much microsoft paid? I will try and find out.

the company I work for is in the poster/art business and they ended up purchasing a poster domain even before Art.com was registered. Well Art.com the domain alone is worth millions. Well at least they purchase posters from us...

cool story

nice sale

Noice :)

damn nice sale

very good sale :)

MS is doing quite a lot to get tht Bing name out there. They're definitely singing some cash around at least. Been seeing "Bing" pop up all over the place lately.

nice score :thumbsup

bing still sucks.

:thumbsup:thumbsup

sweet deal

why would you ever even reg that domain in the first place?

Great news - we all need to sell a lot of signups for that money

Congrats on your sale, i bet if you knew that MS was the buyer you would've put another 0 on that $2500

On the side line:
A webmaster i work with purchased domain: bing.sr a month ago, will he get in trouble with MS for this?

wow imagine if you knew beforehand

Very very nice!

:1orglaugh Good sale. Quick, what other diseases do we know?

bravo...

Congrats on the forward thinking! For those who didn't read the story with the link, Microsoft uses a company by the name of Tenpenny Group Inc. to buy it's domains, so unless you were/are aware of this, you would not of known Microsoft is the buyer. Sedo clearly hides buyers identities but many times they use whois info as well during the contact process.