§.com IDN sold for $7,282
§.com Section sign IDN has been sold for 7,282 USD on Sedo Auction
The section sign (§; Unicode U+00A7, HTML entity §) is a typographical character used mainly to refer to a particular section of a document, such as a legal code. It is frequently used along with the pilcrow (¶), or paragraph sign. When duplicated, as §§, it is read as the plural “sections” (§§ 13–21), unlike “$” (dollars) and much as “pp.” (pages) is the plural of “p.” (page) or “SS” for “saints“. For an effect comparable to the contemporary use of bold type, early scribes would double stroke letters, hence the sign was developed from a double stroked letter S.
Like the dagger (†) and double dagger (‡), it is also sometimes used to link to a footnote where the asterisk (*) is already in use on a given page; however, these usages are declining in favor of numbered footnotes, usually linked by a superscripted (or, decreasingly, square bracketed) number.
Usage
- It is also used to represent a type specimen in animals.
- A section in the United States Code.
- In many 19th Century science and mathematics textbooks, the section symbol is used to refer a reader to a previous or later section. One particular example is the Treatise on Natural Philosophy by Sir William Thompson and Peter Guthrie Tait.
- Many Maxis games, from SimCity 3000 onwards—including The Sims, The Sims Online, and The Sims 2—use this symbol (with a very round loop) to represent the unit of currency in the SimNation, the simoleon.
wikipedia.org
Awesome sale, hopefully the buyer follows through. The bidding got really heated at the end there between two people, was exciting to watch.
I’m all for IDNs, but I’m not sure… I don’t know if this letter is even on keyboards. It definitely receives traffic (according to Sedo), but was it worth it compared to other generic terms that can be bought on the market?
Either way, congrats to the buyer. Great return for a domain purchased in 2007 (.net was taken in 2003 though)!
I used to own this domain and mistakenly allowed it to ‘drop’
about a year or so ago. The section symbol is on several country keyboards and I can confirm that it does receive decent ‘type in’
traffic everyday.
The seller was lucky, and the buyer has a very good domain, and
a bargain to boot!
As a result of this sale, I have seen many comments in the domain
forums with people trying to BS the sale. They simply do not
understand symbol-based domains.. They are genuine, and very real.
The esoteric history of the ‘section’ symbol would intrigue you.
Never allow a lack of knowledge to colour your opinion – buyer
and seller knew exactly what they were doing here…
Richard
FYI – 08. Apr. 201121:12:54 MESZ – resale on ebay auction for EURO 6.050,00 = USD 8.700,00
http://cgi.ebay.de/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=130503028361#ht_500wt_1156
[…] IDN resold for EURO 6.050,00 §.com Section sign IDN has been sold for 7,282 USD on SEDO in Feb 2009 after two years IDN resold for EURO 6.050,00 = USD 8.700,00 at ebay.de […]