What’s in a name

Acne.com, diabetes.com and cholestrol.com are just some of the domain names PlanetRx.com says it has listed for sale with GreatDomains.com, a secondary market seller of domain names. Memphis-based PlanetRx, which in March ceased retail health and beauty product sales on its site to concentrate on high-tech prescription drugs, is putting a total of 26 domain up for sale in an offering that’s already attracting attention from pharmaceutical companies, says Jeffrey Johnson, vice president of country code and secondary market services at VeriSign, Inc., GreatDomains.com’s parent company. The domain names owned by PlanetRx.com are valuable, adds Johnson, because "they’re short and generic, and each represents conditions in which hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on treatments annually." No word on what the URLs are expected to fetch on the market, but GreatDomains.com has previously sold other high-profile domain names at high prices. Among them are loans.com, which went for $3 million; drugs.com, which sold for $823,000; and cinema.com, which went for $700,000.