insight 

News that a company has recently paid a record £560,000 for the domain name cruises.co.uk indicates that the secondary market for .uk domain names is still strong.

Cruise.co.uk decided to pay the large sum to a German travel company for the plural version of the domain name in order to improve their chances of being the first port of call for web users searching for cruise holidays.

What’s interesting is that being the registrant of cruise.co.uk, the purchaser has a clear idea of the potential value of the domain name to their business. They were therefore in a good position to determine what was a fair price as opposed to speculating about potential future revenues.

It should also be noted, of course, that we can’t be sure whether this is actually the highest price paid for a .co.uk domain name, as private sales happen regularly and not everyone is as open as this about how much they have paid.