Half a million dollars paid for online casino domain

The new – and as yet unidentified – owner of the domain www.onlinecasino.dk paid a cool purchase price of $580 000 for it on July 19 this year, according to a report from Business Wire.
 
The report points out that this values the domain at 10 percent of the most expensive gambling url – Slots.com – purchased earlier this year by Bodog Antigua for a reported $5.85 million .  At the time Bodog claimed that the acquisition price paid for Slots.com was the largest amount of money paid out for a domain name in 2010, and among the top 10 fees ever paid for a domain name.
 
The Business Wire report identifies the purchaser only as “an online gaming company based in Malta” and informs that the new owner plans further development of the website.
 
Who Is lookups disclose little more than the fact that the onlinecasino.dk domain was registered in August 1999, with registration expiring in 2013, and that the IP is located in Copenhagen, Denmark.
 
The website is a Danish online gambling casino guide and information portal, promoting several big-name industry operations with Alexa stats showing up to 3,512,704 visitors a month, supporting Business Wire’s boast that it is the top generic domain name in the Nordic country.
 
The high selling price may have been influenced by the Danish government’s approval last (June) month of laws at least partly liberalising the nation’s online gambling market, although there is dissension over discriminatory tax rates, on which an EC ruling is awaited.