Would you spend $1.5 million in a domain name?

I've been following sumome.com for the last year or so. I even use it on Happy Mood Score to get subscribers to our monthly newsletter about employee management, feedback, engagement, remote employees and digital nomads.

I must confess I was very surprised when they announced that they spent $1.5 million to buy sumo.com. That is a lot of money for a generic domain.

Noah Kagan, the founder of SumoMe has a podcast explaining the lessons learned spending that ludicrous amount of money on a domain. Also there is an infographic about how expensive the domain was. Hint: You can buy 28,301 sumo belts with that money.

These are the reasons why I would never spend so much money on a domain like sumo.com:

• It's a word that is unrelated to your business relevant keywords.
• The sport (Sumo) is really well known all over the planet. Sumo has a strong association for most of us and that association is big guys slapping and pushing each other's out of a ring. Do not forget about throwing salt. :-)
• I reckon that for much less than the cost of sumo.com they could have renamed the company, buy a cheap .com and spend a few hundred of thousands advertising the rebranding.

I wonder how many visitors they will get that are looking for some information about Sumo (the sport) and end up visiting that domain.

Noah Kagan is a very smart guy. He did an amazing job at Mint so what I won't do is to criticise or underestimate him. I'm not saying that he's wrong only that I would have put my branding money in another place.

Now let's wait and see what the ROI of this huge buy is. I'm sure he'll write a post about it in due time.