It's 2014 and people are willing to blow $6.8m on things like Z.com

Z.com has been sold for $6.8m (£4.3m, 800m yen) to Japanese domain biz GMO Registry, putting it in the top ten of all-time domain name sales.

As one of only three single-letter dot-coms available – the others being Q and X – the domain was previously owned by Nissan (for its Z-series of cars) and will be used by GMO Registry to rebrand itself for entry into the global domain market.

The $6.8m price tag puts it at number eight in the top ten all-time domain sales, with Sex.com at the top with $13m, followed by hotels.com ($11m), fund.com ($10m), porn.com ($9.5m) and fb.com ($8.5m), diamond.com ($7.5m) and beer.com ($7m).

It also makes it the biggest sale of the year: MI.com was sold for $3.6m in April, Whisky.com for $3.1m in March, and sex.xxx for $3m in June.

Only three single-letter dot-coms were created before rules were put in place to stop them, initially over DNS stability concerns. In 2005, domain-name overlord ICANN briefly considered opening up all the other single-letter names but ultimately decided not to.

As a domain registrar and also registry, why did GMO decide to spend $6.8m on the rarest of all domains? "It is one of the most easily memorable domain names on the internet" and as such "offers an unparalleled marketing opportunity", the company said.

Then comes the marketing spiel: "The last letter in the alphabet. Z is cutting edge. As the last letter in the alphabet, Z represents 'the last word', 'the ultimate'."

There's more: "The Z-axis provides a third dimension. A graph with an x-axis and a y -axis is just a flat 2D image, but adding a z -axis makes it three dimensional and provides greater depth of expression." It has also produced a new logo.

More pragmatically, GMO Registry is the sixth largest registry for new top-level domains, with just over 135,000 of them under its management. It also runs a number of new top-level domains for Japanese cities: .tokyo, .nagoya and .yokohama. And it is in the running for some of the most popular generic domains: .shop and .inc (both of which have no less than nine companies each going for them).

Whether the company would have better spent the money trying to win one of these gTLDs in the inevitable high-cost auction scheduled for the new year, only time will tell. But if you are looking for a memorable domain, then you have to admit, "z.com" is up there. ®