A domain related to J-Pop idol phenomenon Love Live! went up for auction and the lead bid is a very sane $615 million
Japanese fans of the mega-franchise Love Live!, which spans anime, manga, live performances, and games, recently spotted that the domain for the official fan club of Aqours expired and is now up at auction. Top bid? 97.14 billion yen, or $615 million dollars to you, sir.
There are various iterations of Love Live!, all of them being either Jpop groups or solo idols, but Aquors is arguably the most wide-ranging and successful, with over a decade's worth of games, several anime seasons, and live performances. The official Aquors fan club was shuttered in June 2025, which probably explains the timing of this, and fans are fuming that Bandai Namco has let the registration lapse in this manner.
After the shutdown last year, the Aqours Club domain—lovelive-aqoursclub.jp—switched from its previous form to display a fairly standard "thank you and goodbye" message to any visitors. As of May 1 2026, however, that's changed to an auction for the domain hosted by Japanese registration service Onamae. The auction ends on May 27, and obviously is being gamed: either it's Love Live fans making a point, which seems the more likely explanation, or trolls having a laugh.
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The main cause of consternation among fans seems to be that a once-official domain being acquired by a third party opens up the brand and fans to malicious behaviour: this may seem pie-in-the-sky, but the domain currently remains linked across many other official Love Live! sites, including the main one.
Japanese news outlet ITmedia writes (thanks, Automaton): "If the domain falls into the hands of a third party, there is a risk that phishing sites mimicking the official fan club could be created. Since the domain is identical to the genuine one, it cannot be ruled out that such sites could bypass browser security features or cause password management tools to automatically fill in usernames and passwords.”
The Aqours fan club ran alongside the second season of the anime focusing on this particular version of the group, and was tied-in to various pieces of merch and games around it: the old "buy a CD and enter this code for a year's free membership" kinda thing.
But I did promise you furious fans. "Is Bandai Namco stupid or what?" asks AkiraReynir (via machine translation). "A fool who discards the domain less than a year after ending service! They've apparently already forgotten that their brand domain got hijacked before, and that there was a series collab on onamae.com. Beyond saving."
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Eesh! The Japan DNS Operators Group has previously made calls for "end-of-life planning" when it comes to such sites: "When discontinuing a domain, it is recommended to put it into dormancy, perform reverse SEO measures such as requesting removal from search engines and backlink sites, and removing content from archive sites, and only make a decision [about abandoning the URL] after the number of DNS queries falls below a predetermined 'threshold.'"
Well, that clearly hasn't happened here: though I somehow doubt Onamae are getting their $615 million. But it does prove at least, as PCG's Jessica Kinghorn put it, that Love Live fans are "simply something else."
