Is teaparty.com worth a million?

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 21 September 2011 10:36

IT Industry - Strategy

A Canadian band's domain name is said to be worth as much as $US1 million. A bid is on the table, but could it really be for that much? And who would want to buy it?

What's a domain name worth? That's really a 'how long is a piece of string?' question. In many cases, it would be a challenge to find anyone willing to pay anything. But if you've registered a name that someone really wants and they have deep pockets, the sky's the limit.

There's currently much talk about teaparty.com, a domain owned by Canadian 'Moroccan roll' band The Tea Party. That domain is reportedly worth as much as $US1 million, supposedly to the US Tea Party political organisation, or its supporters or detractors.

It's not clear why the (US) Tea Party would pay big money for the domain when it already has the more obvious teaparty.org domain. Some reports suggest teaparty.com ranks highly in Google search results for 'tea party' - while it does appear in the first page of results, it ranks below teaparty.org.

It seems more likely that interest would come from political activists around or opposing the Tea Party, or from commercial interests (beverage manufacturers? hospitality companies?) hoping to cash in on potentially growing interest in the term as the US presidential election approaches.

The Tea Party has recently resumed playing together after a split six years ago, and reportedly will tour Australia in 2012 though this is not shown on the band's official list of tour dates. In a radio interview this week, bassist Stuart Chatwood said "we aren't actively selling the name... we've received many offers since the party came to prominence in America."

Chatwood did confirm part of the story - see page 2.