Donuts sold 7 .news domains as a package for six-figures in 2017

Donuts Inc. today announced the sales of the domain names science.news, food.news, health.news, medicine.news, pollution.news, cancer.news and climate.news.

The exact terms of the sales were not disclosed, though Donuts said that the package was sold for a six-figure price. WebSeed Inc. acquired the names in late 2017 and launched the sites, starting in early 2018.

This announcement of 2017 sales follows several other sales from 2017 that for some reason were announced months later and well into 2018 like Vacation.rentals sold for $500,300 and Home.loans sold for $500,000. (both sold by Donuts) All these together with the.club (private sale) were correctly charted in 2017 domain name sales at Sold.Domains.

You can see here the top 10 New gTLD sales of 2017. (Sale of Vacation.rentals was announced after the article was posted but you can see it here.)

I suggest everyone reads this article by Domain Incite on who bought these domains and how he is using them.

“In an age of ‘fake news’ and too much clutter, we want to offer readers high-quality, fact-based news content,” said Mike Texas, WebSeed founder and chief executive officer. “Use of the .news top-level domain supports our strategy of making our news sites easily discoverable, highly relevant and topically focused. This is only just the beginning for us.”

“Due in part to the sites’ names matching popular organic search terms, most of the websites are now ranking on the first or second pages of the major search engines. Visitors are easily able to discover the websites in search engines by typing in the topics such as “science news” or  “climate news.””

“Articles are thoroughly researched and include all cited sources. Comments and reader interaction are encouraged. Content is updated frequently, and quality and authenticity are top priorities. While there is advertising on the websites, it is limited and relevant to the sites’ content.”

“We congratulate the WebSeed team for quickly establishing such outstanding businesses,” said Matt Overman, senior vice president of sales,  Donuts Inc. “Their use of the .news domains that align with popular search terms, paired with high quality content, has enabled them to launch and scale in record time.”

“Recent research affirms the growing importance of links that use real words. In a survey conducted by Sapio Research and commissioned by Donuts, respondents overwhelmingly opted for branded short links using real words, over links containing long strings of characters and / or legacy short links. Reasons for preferring branded short links using real words included: more meaningful information, clarity of content, identification with the brand, trust and greater simplicity. To learn more about this survey, click here.”