Million Dollar Domain Name Comes to Life as Free Drugs Portal
WILMINGTON, DE - November 5, 2001 (INB) -- Drugs.com, a domain name that has been valued in the millions of dollars, has gone online with its new owner proposing to inject 20 times the purchase price into site development over the next three years.
That's a $20 million show of confidence in a site which is already attracting several thousand daily visitors, 92 percent of whom simply type "drugs.com" into the address box.
The Drugs.com name now headlines a content-rich pharmaceuticals search and information portal (http://www.drugs.com), developed by Drugs.com LLC, Delaware, which purchased the URL in June.
Previous owners, Link Exchange founders Tony Hsieh and Alfred Lin (now Venture Frogs and Zappos Shoes), paid $823,456 for the Drugs.com name in a much-publicized August 1999 auction. In June this year, the West Coast speculators agreed to sell Drugs.com for over a million dollars.
Drugs.com is a free public information service for both consumers and healthcare professionals.
Whilst the owner is a Delaware-based company, site operations have been contracted to a team based in Auckland, New Zealand, where IT costs are considerably lower than those in the U.S.
About Drugs.com: The portal provides access to a database of over 24,000 prescription and over-the-counter pharmaceutical products, searchable by clinical name, brand name or medical condition. Micromedex (a member of the Thomson Healthcare Information publishing group) and Denver-based Multum Information Services are supplying the core library of drug and medical condition information, which will be updated quarterly. Micromedex also provides notes for the site's Care Guide, while Multum's specialist field is highlighted in the Drug Interactions section. Doctors and other healthcare practitioners are invited to register for access to monographs and other material geared specifically to professionals.
