Ostrofsky, Marc

The world record holder, to the best of my knowledge, with respect to the sale price of a domain name. In the mid-1990s, Ostrofsky put a number of his employees to work searching for domain names that had e-commerce potential.They searched for just about any word in the English language, especially words preceded with e- or e. As a result of that effort, he identified and registered www.eflowers.com . In 1999, he rejected an offer of $1,000,000 from Flowers Direct, preferring to sell it to them for $25,000, plus $0.50 for every transaction generated over the Web site, plus free flowers for his wife (now ex-wife), Sarah, for the rest of her life. Given the projections of 500,000 transactions per year, Ostrofsky realized an excellent return on an investment of $70.00. Ostrofsky later sold the rights to www.business.com for $7,000,000, a domain name he had acquired a few years earlier for $250,000 for use in connection with a business he later sold for many millions of dollars. See also domain name.