To most marketers, short URLs are cool. For example, last year, GMO Internet Inc., a Japanese ISP, paid about $6.8 million for Z.com.
Here’s why GMO paid up for Z.com:
Z.com is one of only three single-character domain names currently existing in the .com space — Z.com is highly memorable and offers unparalleled marketing opportunity.
Only six one-letter .coms exist: I.net, Q.com, Q.net, X.com, X.org, and Z.com. Elon Musk famously started PayPal in 1999 with the X.com domain. The URL is still owned by PayPal, although it is not in use.
However, it seems that the short URL does not hold the same attraction at Wells Fargo & Co.
Wells Fargo has until recently housed its mobile website at WF.com, a domain the bank has owned since 1993 and which is not scheduled to expire until 2018. That changed recently to m.wellsfargo.com.
OK, so this is not exactly groundbreaking news, but it led us to wonder, What should Wells do with the URL? We plugged the domain into one of those free domain appraisal tools, and, lo and behold, WF.com is apparently worth exactly $291,616.34. Maybe someone at Wells should call Elon Musk?