Webfusion

Wow. While most companies tighten their belts and cut costs, Toys R Us has stumped up a huge $5.1m for the domain name toys.com.

It’s clearly a highly-desirable domain name (four-letter word domains don’t come along very often) and absolutely ideal for the market Toys R Us is a part of. However, it’s still an awful lot of money to spend on a domain. Any domain.

Is it worth it?

I’m sure Toys R Us will receive a ton of visitors through toys.com – whether those visitors type it straight into their browser, or come through a search engine like Google. And the publicity following the sale won’t hurt either.

It seems an even better purchase when you think about all the different ways the brand name can be entered into a web browser. For instance, the logo has a backwards ‘R’ in it, which your keyboard definitely doesn’t have.

And I’m sure some people mistype the ‘R’ as ‘are’. Surprisingly, Toys R Us isn’t the owner of toysareus.com, but by promoting toys.com as the main URL, they should be able to cut down on that particular mistype (as well as others).

Not the biggest

Big money domain names sales don’t happen every week, but they aren’t that uncommon either. As this list of the most expensive domain name sales of all time suggests, $5.1m puts toys.com into about joint 7th place, next to asseenontv.com.

(Incidentally, there doesn’t seem to be a single authoritative list of the most expensive domain names. Check out the subtle differences between this one, this one and this one for some alternative opinions.)

Toys R Us obviously thinks toys.com is worth spending $5m on. Do you? Leave a comment and let us know.

If you want to find out more on this story, it’s covered on TechCrunch. You can see how the bidding went over at DirectNavigation.com.