The owner of the domain name is Michael Minasian. And this is his rationale for the valuation of his domain.
I came upon the ANTILLES.COM domain name more than a decade ago. At the time, my firm did some work for the Bonaire Tourism Organization and, given the web was just coming into presence, I thought they would appreciate having a good internet address. At the time (1995, I think), one could snag just about any domain name without difficulty. However, they saw no need for it and I just paid the nominal fee on it for several years.
When I had an engineer turn it up on one of our servers, I was quite surprised to see instantaneous traffic of more than 100 hits/day, 60% of which came from EU countries. Further scrutiny revealed that the name “antilles” was being sought intuitively by folks looking for information on the West Indies. We have never advertised the site in any way, yet continue to see 1,000-1,500 unique hits per month. Moreover, the term “Antilles” is searched with similar frequency to the term “Caribbean“. If the website were to be commercially developed and advertised on the major search engines, the traffic would increase to hundreds of thousands or millions of monthly hits. Considering that the revenue from these potential consumers involves plane flights, hotels, car rental, recreation, gambling, real estate, etc., the present price at under $200k is a bargain bordering on a steal – a fraction of the cost of a beachfront condo.
ANTILLES.COM is an instantly memorable web address, and likely the only quality Caribbean .com domain that has not been fully developed as yet. I am going to let the marketplace have at it until mid-January at the latest. At that point, if I still own it, I’ll develop it myself, perhaps as an ISP branding. After all, I can’t think of a more prestigious e-mail address than <your name> @antilles.com.
