On Tuesday, the domain name Contests.com was sold for $380,000 in the Aftermarket.com live domain auction held at the Domain Roundtable conference in Washington, DC. It was sold by Yahoo, and went to National A-1, a well-known buyer of generic domain names.

Some bloggers and domain investors have already commented on the auction’s top sale, mostly saying the domain should have sold for more. TechCrunch, for example, said Yahoo was “selling killer domain names on the cheap“. I disagree with this statement.

I think $380,000 is a fair price for Contests.com in today’s market. The reserve price was set at $150,000, so the domain was ultimately sold for more than twice the reserve. This shows that the seller, Yahoo, was willing to let the domain go for much less than the final sale price. The buyer, National A-1, on the other hand, may have been willing to bid higher. But we will never find out, so speculating about this makes little sense. Instead, we should take this as a sign that generic domain names are still trading at good market prices, even in today’s difficult economic situation. In an ideal setting, maybe it would have been possible for the domain to go for $400k to $500k, but I’m no fan of “what if” debates.

National A-1 got a good domain at a fair price. It didn’t overpay, but it didn’t get a steal from today’s perspective, either. Yahoo was able to sell a domain that it would probably not have put to good use in the foreseeable future and turned it into much-needed cash. What’s not to like about this transaction?