Malta.com for sale again

The malta.com domain is for sale again and the owner, an English businessman residing in Malta, wants somewhere in the region of €200,000-€250,000 to bequeath it.

Possibly the first web domain that comes to mind when thinking of Malta on the internet, malta.com never established itself as the premier website about Malta. It was eclipsed by other local news websites and portals, according to different surveys along the years.

English businessman Robert Morrison purchased the malta.com domain in 2006 with the intention of making it “the” portal to Malta on the web. However the $250,000 he spent at the time just to get hold of the domain seems to have brought little return as four years later he put the domain up for sale for roughly the same price.

When i-Tech contacted Mr Morrison to explain the reasons for the sale, he declined to go into details, citing a transaction in progress.

“The buyer has expressed a wish for anonymity but I have made him aware of your interest and, when the domain changes hands, you are free to contact him directly. Further than that I am unable to comment,” he told this newspaper.

However when i-Tech checked the details of the holder of the domain malta.com just before this article went to print, they still showed Mr Morrison and his Gżira office as the owner and administrative contact.

This newspaper had asked him specifically for details about the popularity of the domain and website, his decision to sell it and the challenges of maintaining a website with such a potential.

Over the last four years malta.com was developed into a portal with information about Malta, including visitors’ information, a hotel booking engine, a business directory, a web directory, free classified ads and other basic information about the Maltese Islands.

Mr Morrison had bought malta.com from Carl Fsadni, a Maltese emigrant in the United States who also held other Malta-related domains such as the sister-domain malta.net.

Before selling to Mr Morrison, Mr Fsadni had tried, in vain, to cash in on malta.com by trying to convince the Maltese government to buy the domain and use it as a primary marketing tool for incoming tourism to Malta.

Industry observers told i-Tech that while there is potential in the domain malta.com, the most important thing is the content, not the domain.

Visitmalta.com, the official website of the Malta Tourism Authority is the most visible among popular websites that include the word “Malta” in the domain name.

However a simple search in Google with the keyword “Malta” confirms that only four websites out of the first 10 ranked have the word “Malta” in the domain, and these include visitmalta.com and malta.com. The rest include the Maltese government’s website gov.mt, the Wikipedia page on Malta, the European Commission’s page on Malta, and the Maltese page of the travellers’ guide Lonely Planet.

Few Malta-related web domains have made internet history through a sale. Maybe the other memorable one was the sale of Maltese web directory searchmalta.com for an undisclosed sum, reportedly running in tens of thousands of Maltese liri, in the early noughties. Once again, a domain owned by a Maltese emigrant to the United States was sold to a Maltese business, this time it was the internet service provider Maltanet, today part of Go. Despite the price tag, searchmalta.com today is out of the internet radar of Maltese internet users. Its design and some of its sections have not been updated for several years and there is no integration with social networks such as Facebook or YouTube, confirming the years of neglect.

Ex-pats remain important figures in the history of Maltese internet. Malta’s first web presence on the web, Grazio’s Malta Virtwali, was the creation of Maltese emigrant Grazio Falzon. Launched in 1994, a year before internet access was even available in Malta, it was transformed into aboutmalta.com a few years later.

Today it’s a web directory of Malta-related websites with some regularly updated content, including historical events of the day, a weather report and news headlines.