Twitter.com Domain Name Was Sold For $7,500

Sites include Twitter.com . Published on February 10th, 2012. Written by Anthony West.

Twitter is one of the webs most trafficked websites; worth at least $10 billion, so it comes as a bit of a shocker that its founders paid a measly $7,500 for the domain that is now instantly recognizable around the world.

Speaking at a recent domain conference, co-founder Biz Stone gave the back-story about how the domain was actually acquired. Apparently when the company was first started, he and his fellow founder wanted a name that suggested urgency. At first the domain jitter was considered, but was abandoned after they realized it had too negative a connotation.

Shortly after they came across Twitter in the dictionary, but found to their dismay that the name was already registered. They registered Twttr.com initially and decided later to approach the owner of Twitter.com. It turns out the owner was a bird enthusiasts (no surprise there) and they offered what at the time was a lot of money ($7,000). Bird enthusiast perhaps doesn’t see 7K every day, and apparently the domain owner accepted faster than they could blink.

The rest as they say is history. Today, Twitter is approaching its 500 millionth user and plans are to take that figure eventually to over 1 billion. If the bird enthusiast had known, he might held out for more—perhaps $1 million!