I was surprised to see Apartment.in sell for almost $10,000

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a .IN domain sale making news, but today I read an article on Elliot’s Blog about a recent auction that Sedo ran focused on .IN domain names. For those who don’t know, .IN is not a new domain extension, it’s been around a while it just doesn’t get much buzz any more. A lot of very premium one-word .IN domains sold in the Sedo auction, many of these would be six or seven figure names in .COM but are four figure names in the .IN market.

The top sale was Apartment.in which sold for $9,950. The next highest sale was Big.in which sold for $4,999. I actually do get the brandability of .IN in some cases and Apartments.in seems like a logical one to me. At the same time I’m concerned that almost no consumer knows about .IN so they’re likely to type in ApartmentsIn.com rather than thinking a domain name can end with an .IN.

Yes, for people in the domain name industry, you know .IN, you might not invest in it, but it’s fair to say you know about it. For the average person I think .IN is a mystery and if they see Apartment.in on a billboard they might not necessarily end up typing that into their browsers. Of course, maybe that’s just me but I don’t think .IN has had as much press as other extensions like .IO and .AI that are in the media just about every day.

What do you think? Was Apartment.in a good buy at $9,950 or is .IN a tough extension to brand around?