ViSalus Buys Challenge.com and Vi.com for $825,000

ViSalus purchase 2 top domains: Challenge.com and Vi.com for $825,000.

Visalus CEO Ryan Blair (Photo): Consider it yet another concrete stake in the ground that shows our commitment and investment into the brand expansion (and continued market domination) of ViSalus and the Body By Vi 90-Day Challenge.

Together, the domain names were purchased by ViSalus for $500,000 and $325,000, respectively. The purchase of “challenge.com” alone is one of the top ten most expensive domain names bought in 2011, through today. At a combined value of $825,000, the two domains together would be the fourth highest purchase over that time, and individually “challenge.com” and “vi.com” are the second and third most expensive buys of domain names this year, behind only the million-dollar “dudu.com.”

So why did ViSalus shell out all this cash for its two new domain names? According to Co-founder and CEO Ryan Blair, the company just announced a seven-fold year-over-year sales increase in 2011 to $231 million, which means that the purchases represent a fraction of a percentage of current sales.

Obviously, this means that, for all intents and purposes, ViSalus now owns the word “challenge” online, and Blair says that with the acquisition of “vi.com,” the company has gained a “simple, multilingual brand architecture” that can help them work towards creating a global, household name.

The company’s goal is to acquire one million customers before the end of 2012, and Blair thinks that putting the new domain names to work will help speed up “the viral nature of the Body By Vi Challenge.” The move is meant to complement the recent launch of The Challenge, a newsstand publication that features Body By Vi success stories and is expanding into Canada this month.

It’s a lot of money to dish out to promote healthier living, but with Americans spending upwards of $50 billion on products and services designed to help them lose weight and stay in shape, there’s certainly plenty of demand for the type of platform ViSalus is building, and owning the word “challenge” on the Web certainly doesn’t hurt.

Source: Tech Crunch