Many newspapers around the globe were writing about some people who registered domains related to Virginia Tech Shooting early and that they were selling them on eBay for insane prices (half a million dollar or so). But do you know if any of these or similar sales was successful?
LoL Half a Million for these Domain Names =)) thats really insane sure no one would buy it now, its a old news now No idea whether they sold it... I dont think that anyone will buy the domain for that high price
Just to make myself clear: I'm asking if any of these domains got sold for any price. BTW Asking a lot of money for such a domain turned out to work well isn't it because they got huge publicity.
How would you monetize such a site & recoup your "investment"? What type of ads? Guns? Typing "virginia tech" into Google show very few & lowing Adsense. They may be asking for 1/2 million but I highly doubt they are selling at 1/2 million.
I hate it when someone exploit a sad violent incident like V Tech. This is just irresponsible. I hope that whoever bought it put it to good use like to remember the people who got killed in that unfortunate event.
You don't necessarily exploit such sad incidents; you could use them for good causes (like eddy2099 said). And you can earn money while doing the right things there is no evil in that. Okay buying a domain and selling it in minutes is pure business but I wouldn’t call it exploit (though I wouldn't do it in this case). Otherwise, a lot of domain sales would be just as bad as that. Not to mention newspapers and other media who earn money when incidents happen. Most probably somebody thought about that a site on this subject with such a domain name would bring much traffic those days. You don’t need to sell guns or anything, traffic is good and can be monetized (without being bad) whether targeted or not. It's a very sad example for sure, but at times we all forget that there are some keywords which never brought any traffic but they might bring huge traffic tomorrow. So far, we can be pleased to say that the domains that have some content on them are quite okay. One of them for example, has a list of people who died and asks you to pray for them with a very suggestive picture and that’s it.