Why Nike Inc. should buy Ni.ke for $10,000

This week, news broke that Kenya’s country code top-level domain name (TLD) administrator, Kenya Network Information Centre (KeNic) would be introducing their second TLD, which is .ke, thus birthing the possibility of custom domains such as ni.ke, mi.ke and bi.ke.

According to Techweez, KeNic has a total of 913 domains in the auction with the highest bid being Ksh.1,000,004.00 (about $9,700 USD) for the custom domain name, ni.ke, which begs the question:

Will Nike Inc. purchase the ni.ke premium domain for about $10,000?

In my opinion, $10,000 for a premium domain such as ni.ke is a steal. It should be $1 million or more. For one thing, Nike Inc. is a very huge multinational corporation which recorded over $9 billion in revenues in August 2017, so spending $10,000, or even $1 million for a premium domain name such as ni.ke isn’t going to be a bad idea.

For another, if you consider the thousands of dollars the company spends every week on advertising and compare that sum with the one-time cost of acquiring the ni.ke premium domain, coupled with the huge cost of losing out on acquiring the domain name, it makes perfect sense.

But just in case Nike Inc. is not considering acquiring the ni.ke domain name now because of its cost, it needs to pause and think about how much value the ni.ke domain name can bring to its business.

So Nike, just do it already.