hotel.com / hotels.com I think it's a lot less than you might think. A lot of companies will have established their brand prior to the internet - or will have done so after the very best EMDs were taken. Books.com, for example, redirects to Barns & Noble, but that is their established brand name.
Dougs just paid a whack for shopping.uk for red brain. Not quite what you asked but shows the value of a type in / authority domain
sounds about right .... (shouts "https://seemly.co.uk/domains/prices" and checks....) Aah yes. Spot on.
There are quite many EMD/GDN + .UK poker.uk —> pokerstars.uk logistics.uk —> fortna.com etc. A bit out of topic but very often such kind of domain sells can be done through third parties (advertising/creative agencies) who is trying to sell the concept to their client. Even then there are different strategies for how companies use EMD sites. 1) They use it as the main domain. 2) The simplest way is if the end client redirects traffic from GDN (most of the times it is used for a specific seasonal campaign) but I wouldn’t say that nowadays that is the main business especially for II or III categories GDN. 3) Ranking sites (hiding the owner). Sidenote about II & III category GDN: If you type into Google: “best CRM …”, “best hosting …”, “best domain …”, etc. then what do you think how many third parties sites are owned or bought a place on top by giants like GoDaddy, Hostgator, Salesforce, Pipedrive, etc.? Simple answer: if you put yourself on average online users shoes who is looking for the best CRM platform and on Google first two pages pop up 4 ranking sites that say that trust X-company because it just is good as Harry’s Roly Polys then why wouldn’t you trust Google? ** .COM list that was last time updated in 2017 (but still there are still many missing). https://www.domainsherpa.com/large-companies-that-own-generic-domain-names/
£45,000 might sound a lot but we have to understand the market size and potential target audience (companies) options who can benefit from it. * If the current owner wants to double the money then I believe it is quite easy to do: 1) £90,000 would be just one mid-man salary in a big corp and for a company who have hundreds or thousands of employees for them, such amount of money is like for us buying a bread. ** Fact: More and more people moving online to buy stuff. Two scenarios and questions to understand the domain value: 1) If a retailer has a shop in one of these fancy malls or store next to the main road + staff per shop 15-30 people + how many customers this store and staff can serve in one month? How much has sale impacted by rainy weather/road works next end of the street/etc.? How much headache, organizing it will take and what are all running costs end of the year or after 5-10 years? Now if you compare that number and time you need to run an online store (that you should have any way in 2020!) + we can’t forget the important: a) people type into Google “shopping” b) online you can reach to people globally not only locals. If I try to look at it from (mid-big retail) CFO perspective, I would say that £45,000 would be a bargain for the domain. *** If the current site shopping.uk is its real business then 25,000 stores and millions of products … if it, not a try to create another Amazon 2.0 then I would say that commission fees that they can cash in from third parties are probably going to be very minimal before they haven’t proved to be an equal partner. Sometimes it is easier to start as a small “unique boutique” and show the real value and potential for the well-known brands who can help them to run it (example: at the moment it is like 150 floors shopping mall). End of the day it would be interesting to know does the current site is just a placeholder and attempt to attract potential buyers or dive into online business.
One problem with building a brand with EMDs is IP i.e. trademark - shopping.uk could grow to be a huge online business, but someone could just open the same business with shopping.online and there isn't much shopping.uk could do to challenge it
