Dror Efrat launched Investing.com in 2007 to earn $20-30K/month, sold it for $500 million
It was on December 16, 2012, that the Investing.com domain was acquired for $2.45 million, five years after Mr. Efrat founded the firm as ForexPros.com. At that time, this represented one of the 20 most expensive domain names ever purchased. Today, however, today that domain is worth several times its purchase price.
Investing.com, one of the top three global financial websites according to both SimilarWeb and Alexa, has been sold to an international investment fund based in East Asia for $500 million, Globes reported.
The firm, co-founded by Dror Efrat who is also Chairman, provides real-time data, quotes, charts, financial tools, breaking news and analysis across 250 exchanges in 44 language editions.
The Tel Aviv-based site, with over 250 employees, has grown to more than 5 million mobile visitors a day, 3 billion pageviews, 46 million monthly users and over 400 million sessions. Founded in 2007, Investing.com also has offices in Madrid, Milan, Tokyo, Mumbai, Seoul, and Shenzhen.
Mr. Efrat had no high ambitions for the platform when he launched it in 2007: “I thought it would be something that could earn $20,000-30,000 per month and that would be nice. I didn’t think it would be a full time job but to help in getting it going and then move on to other things”, he told Globe.
It was on December 16, 2012, that the Investing.com domain was acquired for $2.45 million, five years after Mr. Efrat founded the firm as ForexPros.com. At that time, this represented one of the 20 most expensive domain names ever purchased. Today, however, today that domain is worth several times its purchase price.
It has rapidly grown in value to become one of the retail FX industry’s most prized pieces of real estate. Retail FX news and market events portal Investing.com has become one of the staple reads for many traders globally, its multi-lingual content having been instrumental to its growth and domination of the market news sector.
Two specific factors are responsible for its exponential appreciation in value, one being that domain names with absolute reference to their subject being the only part of their wording are now into the tens of millions in value, the other being that by positioning itself as Investing.com, the word Investing has become a household name and is intrinsically associated with the website from which it provides its service.
It is rather like suggesting that instead of looking up something on the internet via a search engine, pretty much the entire world now says “let’s Google it”. Having a single-word name that represents the exact category that it serves achieves the same ‘household name’ style end result in terms of the entity that it represents.
Now, the domain name is inseparable to the actual business with its engaged users and massive global audience, which combined are worth a fortune.
