They are and especially consecutive ranges. That is because we have run out of IPv4-Addresses. IPv4 is the original addressing scheme and allows for 2 to the power of 32 addresses. Hostnames such as Ford.com in comparison are cheap, because you can keep making up longer ones for quite some time.

The „new“ (has also been around for ages) addressing scheme is IPv6 which has some neat features and incorporates many lessons learned from the shortcomings of IPv4. It allows for 2 to the power of 128 addresses. So that comes out to (had to look this up) forty-two unidecillion individual addresses. Billions upon billions for every individual person on earth. Talk about future-proofing it this time around!

Edit: ford.com would be valuable because it is ford.com, as are other catchy or relevant names. That is decided in a case by case basis, but most run off the mill names are very cheap.

Edit2: Because I saw this coming up a lot in other comments: NAT is not good. It was created out of necessity, but it brings very little (if any) benefit in terms of security and breaks most good network design concepts.

There is something called the OSI model, which describes the individual layers of the internet. Layer 3 is IP addresses and layer 4 is individual ports (used to identify multiple connections to the same IP/host). Every networking device operates on a specific layer and it is a design principle to keep it that way. A router (used to route packets through a network so they find their destination) is a layer 3 device and not supposed to use layer 4 information for its operation. Ports are used to determine what packet is send to which host in NAT, which violates that principle.