This past week LongIsland.com was sold for $370,000. That’s right, I said three-hundred-seventy-THOUSAND dollars. It’s been years since LongIsland.com changed their design. I have heard they have one or two employees who maintain the site. It’s obvious from the banners they have that their is a sales person or persons responsible for selling. Doubtfully a dedicated sales rep, but none-the-less someone is selling to Long Island companies that are buying.

Last year when I was working on another project (one I won’t give the benefit of a link from my site let alone a mention) Rick Latona [the company representing longisland.com] reached out to the owners (of my company @ the time) and offered the domain, its inventory of pages and staff for $1.2 million. It wasn’t in the cards for them and honestly I’m happy they didn’t. I understand that was a reduced price from the prior year. Either way the domain went to auction last month and sat dormant. Sat dormant while Long Island big wigs with big dreams but shallow wallets sat by in hopes of a lower asking price. And it happened, the domain name’s reserve price was lowered to $350,000. It sold the same day for $370,000. Coincidentally the average price for a house on Long Island.

The new owner has not been revealed. I have my hunches on who it could be. I can confirm that it’s not Prime Visibility/Andrew Hazen nor is it the Long Island Radio Group. I can also say (in certainty) that it’s not the Long Island Press… so hmmm…

Some stats from the auction page:
12 Month 2009 Metrics: Average monthly page views 584,000 Average monthly uniques 179,000 70% of all US visitors are from Long Island

Stats:
Alexa Ranking: 126,628
Overture Score: 409
Inbound Links: 319
Maximum Cost Per Click: $0.20
No. Of  PPC Ads: 225
Domain Age: 13 years
Pagerank: 5
Pages in Google Index: 5690
Competing Search Results In Google: 80,300,000
Local Search Volume: 6,120,000
Global Monthly Search Volume: 6,120,000
Auction link: http://www.proxibid.com/asp/Catalog.asp?aid=25586&p=1&srch=search%20catalog&sort=3

I wont lie, I would have loved to have been at the helm of this domain name. Especially where I am now. There are so many possibilities that can be done with this domain name and it certainly does very well organically.

- Joe