What's with seemingly rubbish 5L .coms going for good money at auction?

I like good 5L brandable .coms as much as the next person, but looking through recent sales I'm surprised to see the amount of money being spent on, in my opinion at least, worthless names. I'm talking > $1000 being spent on unpronounceable or horrible sounding domains.

Is this just a gold rush for short "brandables", with people not thinking seriously about the usability of their purchases?

Obviously, there may well be more to the story than meets the eye, or the name might hold some personal or commercial significance to the buyer that's not readily apparent to others, but I'd love to get people's thoughts about recent trends.

I'd like to post examples, but I don't want to inadvertently hurt people's chance of a sale.

 

Can you mention the venue at least?

 

I'll post some here, but I'll obfuscate them.

x/c/f/d/c/.com - $1001 (NameJet)

f/t/t/c/j/.com - $1225 (GoDaddy)

g/o/w/a/w/.com - $2000 (Sedo)

e/y/i/m/a/.com - $1700 (namejet)

g/e/i/o/c/.com - $2056

Again, I assume I must be missing something. But after a bit of Googling I'm still struggling to understand why people are paying money for these...

 

I believe these are just few exceptions for various reasons, but usually crappy 5Ls are dropping like rain

 

Here you go for your first one, do some research on other you will see why people paid big buck.

http://www.xcfdc.gov.cn

 

And here's a clue to the last one - geico. Typos can draw a lot of unintentional traffic.

 

There is some very clever detective work displayed here!

That inspired me, so I googled F/T/T/C/J and found a site called CuteStat.

It describes the name as “Fast Traffic Trader - free, fast, stable traffic trading script for CJ”.

So previously, the domain had high traffic and allegedly some pretty good revenue. (CJ no doubt refers to Commission Junction the big ad affiliate platform.)

“Fast Traffic Trader Commission Junction”

Some people buy these types of names purely to harvest some of the residual traffic and valuable backlinks.

So a similar name like FTTCM would probably be worthless in comparison.