March 25, 2013
Comments (1)
Got some strong keyword domains on the list today. In the past I've spent more of my time finding domain names to purchase and less time on selling my inventory but I've flipped this around the past few weeks and made a concerted effort to be proactive in selling my domains and then using my spare time to search for new domains to buy. The result has been increased sales, nothing spectacular to write home about as most of these sales are in the $500-$1,000 range, but considering my average purchase price on what I've been selling is under $100 (and quite a few recent hand reg domains) it is a nice return on my investments.
Here's today's list...
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March 24, 2013
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If you are familiar with the saga of the domain Cowboys.com then you will truly appreciate the irony of this. One of my favorite television shows is The League. Season 4, Episode 1.... One of the characters (Taco) in the show gets a call from Jerry Jones (owner of the Dallas Cowboys and playing himself in the episode). Taco tells his friends (who don't believe it is Jerry Jones) that Jerry probably is interested in the domain name DallasCowboys.com that he bought and was squatting on.
Taco and friends go to Jerry's office and Jerry writes a number on a slip of paper to pay for the domain DallasCowboys.com. That number is $250,000.
I'm not explaining this so if you get it cool, if not then not. I was chuckling up a storm and I'm not a normal chuckler.
March 22, 2013
Comments (1)
There's been a noticeable shift in Namejet auctions happening and I kind of like it. There have been tons of high quality domain names up for auction that have reserve prices. I'd say 8 out of every 10 that I watch fail to sell because they did not hit reserve (the reserves are too high IMO for the every day domainer). And the 2 that sell are premium ones that sell for mid five figures. So it's a tough life out there for the every day domainer on those auctions.
What I like though is that these high reserve auctions are distracting people from the no reserve auctions as I've been able to scoop up some domains on the cheap that I know would have sold for more if these reserve auctions were not around. One funny thing I saw was a reserve auction where the reserve was $79. It sold for $79. Really? Too funny.
Here's today's list...
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February 28, 2013
Comments (0)
The GreatDomains.com auction is closing shortly, highest domain to hit reserve as of now is Withdraw.com at $10k. MySchool.com has the highest bid at $41k but reserve has not been met yet (could be up to $49,999).
Here's the domains with bids of $1,000 or more...
| Domain |
Current Bid |
Reserve Met? |
| myschool.com |
41,000 USD |
No |
| withdraw.com |
10,050 USD |
Yes |
| yrn.com |
5,800 USD |
Yes |
| anniversaire.com |
5,100 EUR |
Yes |
| tour.net |
4,600 USD |
Yes |
| white.net |
4,350 USD |
No |
| mqo.com |
4,300 USD |
No |
| anniversaires.com |
4,000 EUR |
No |
| zvv.com |
4,000 USD |
Yes |
| sad.net |
3,000 EUR |
No |
| doot.com |
2,450 USD |
Yes |
| outsourcing.net |
2,000 USD |
No |
| jog.org |
1,250 USD |
No |
| 711.net |
1,050 EUR |
Yes |
February 25, 2013
Comments (3)
After two weeks of back and forth negotiations through Sedo I just closed a deal to sell a domain name. The domain is parked on the DomainNameSales platform with the "For Sale" banner at the top of the site. DNS makes it much more transparent for a person to make an educated guess who they are dealing with while Sedo's platform offers the veil of anonymity. If the buyer had contacted me through the DNS platform the price I'd be trying to get would be less then I ask on Sedo because I have to pay Sedo the 15% commission. Likewise, if I know all this and I know the buyer is more concerned with protecting their anonymity I can make an educated guess that I'm dealing with a company instead of an individual. Of course this won't be the case every time, but to me it makes sense logically. And as most (if not all) domainers do, when I think I'm dealing with a company my pricing expectations just jumped a few notches. So they got their desired anonymity... for a price.
Here's today's list...
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February 22, 2013
Comments (0)
I've had a string of people make an offer for a domain name of mine listed at DomainNameSales and then when I write back to them they disappear. In two cases I accepted their offer so there was no negotiation to be had. Kinda sucks but what can you do.
Here's today's list...
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February 21, 2013
Comments (5)
I was looking through the auction results and saw a bunch of solid quality domains that did not sell due to not meeting reserve. I always loved Namejet because you could snag a good deal due to the no-reserve auctions, maybe it didn't happen every day for you but the possibility was there.
The reserve auctions at Namejet are putting me off a little bit. One example is an auction that closed today for TheHotel.com. The bidding reached $21k and still had not met reserve. You don't know what the reserve price was since there is no 'reserve range'. The high bidder in the end was bidding against himself. The second high bidder bid $12,000 and the high bidder came in at $15,500 (reserve auctions are not proxy bids when the reserve has not been met). Reserve still hadn't been met so he bid again at $21,000... instead of offering $100 more then the previous high bidder as you would in a normal non-reserve Namejet auction, the high bidder was now offering $9,000 (or 75% more) than the second highest bidder. Reserve still not met. Having to bid against yourself is not in the spirit of what I feel has made Namejet successful. Yes, you can say they are branching out, fine, it just goes against why I loved Namejet so much. I think they should at least put a reserve range in there so that people aren't wasting their time bidding if the reserve range is well beyond what they can/would pay.
Comments (2)
If you've been bidding on Snapnames and Namejet for a while you may be familiar with this (or maybe not) but it definitely has helped me in the past... if I'm bidding any kind of significant money on a domain I will Google the username of the main person bidding against me. There's lots of historical auction results out there so I can almost always find a domain name that this person has previously won. I do a Whois on that domain and now I know who I'm bidding against. If you subscribe to a place that allows you to do a reverse whois you can take that person's email and see the other domains they own. From there it is pretty easy to tell if you're bidding against a pro or against a newbie. I won't get into my specific strategies from there, but knowing that information helps me formulate my bidding strategy quite a bit.
Here's today's list...
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February 20, 2013
Comments (0)
I get emails every so often from domainers asking for my opinion or perspective on something and a common question always relates to pricing. People see the big sales (because that is what makes the news) and they get nervous that they are leaving money on the table by pricing their domains too cheap. What you should consider when pricing your domains is that for every $25,000 sale of a domain that you'd value at $500 occurs it is (I'd say most of the time) because that domain owner priced hundreds or thousands of inquiries similarly and for every XXX or XXXX number of sales that he lost because of the high pricing he manages to get one sale for that price range. You will always see those sales hit the wire but what you won't see if all the inquiries that went nowhere because of that type of pricing. There is no right/wrong way to do things, it is personal preference, but you should realize that you are only seeing one side of the story.
Here's today's list...
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February 19, 2013
Comments (0)
There's a lot of top quality domain names currently at auction on Namejet and coming up for auction on Namejet that are coming from the owners (versus deleting/expiring domains). They all have reserves. When you see top quality domains coming to auction there are two thoughts I have... one is excitement at the chance to pick up an amazing domain, but the second thought is did the owner already bang on all the potential end users' doors trying to sell the domain and fail and so now auctioning it off on a mostly domainer platform is a backup plan to move the domain. What I like about deleting/expiring auctions is that I feel like most of the previous owners did not go around peddling the domain to potential end users and so you have a big opportunity there. But if you're buying a domain and the end users were already contacted is there any upside left for you? Sure, maybe in the future as things change, but if you're dropping mid five figures or more on a domain the average domainer cannot sit on that type of capital investment for years. Just something to consider...
Here's today's list...
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February 15, 2013
Comments (0)
When negotiating with a potential buyer a lot of times it is easy to tell when the person is not familiar with domain name values. They think paying more than $100 is ridiculous. You're getting nowhere with them. Time to try something. There are two analogies that I use to try to put it into perspective for them. One is relating it to land value which I think quite a few domainers do so I won't discuss further. The second one is if I know (or find out) what their product or service is I'll ask them what it costs. Let's say they sell a product that is priced at $100. I'll ask them what they would say to a potential customer came and said they only wanted to pay $2 because that's all they think it is worth. I'll then show them some recent domain name sames that are comparable to the domain they are inquiring about and point out and relate that to the $2 offer for their product. I frame it a little more eloquently but you get the point. If you can show them the current market prices and relate it to what they deal in everyday sometimes it can open their eyes to how low their offer is. Some people are stubborn and refuse to accept the point, but sometimes you get through. Hey, you can't win them all.
Here's today's list...
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February 14, 2013
Comments (8)
Anytime a premium .com and the same .net sell I take notice because that is good information to know as people always seem to ask how much of a .com is the .net worth. Today Vodka.net's auction closed at Snapnames. The closing price... well, before we get to that we know that Vodka.com sold for $3 million back in 2006. We also know that Pizza.com sold for $2.6 million back in 2008 and in 2010 Pizza.net sold in a private sale though a hint alluded that it was sold for six figures. A side note, a search in Google for Pizza.net says that the site may be compromised and some of the results for the site are talking about pharma products so not sure what is going on there... And not exactly the same but somewhat close, CreditCards.com sold in 2004 for $2.75 million and CreditCard.net sold in 2011 for $138,000. If you know any more feel free to mention them below in the comments but these are what popped into my head off the cuff.
If you had to take a guess for the closing price of Vodka.net what would it be? Well, the correct answer would be $20,000. Interesting? To me it is.
Comments (0)
Before we get into the list here's something I read about that was interesting... a guy worth tens of millions of dollars that won't spring for a great domain name to start his business on. I'm talking about Tiki Barber of New York Giants fame. He is the co-founder of a business that I actually think is a great idea and could do pretty well. The business let's people hire current and former athletes for a speaking event, a round of golf, an instructional session, etc... If you go on the website you'll see it is a pretty sweet website. Looks nice, easy to use, definitely spent the bucks on the site development. Where he failed in my opinion is the name of his business...
Thuzio.com. Say what?
I came across his business when I saw him doing an AMA on Reddit. You can
find that here if want to learn how much he squats or what he does in his spare time now. What I found especially entertaining was when someone asked him how he came up with the name Thuzio. His response to the question was "Random....short for Enthusiasts. No rights issues." I am failing to see how Thuzio is short for enthusiasts. It also isn't an easy to remember name. I read the Reddit article a few weeks ago and today when I wanted to talk about it I could not remember his site's name so I had to use Google to find it. The domain name Enthusiasts.com is for sale so either he didn't try typing it into the browser, or he requested a quote and was put off by the price, not sure which. If I had to guess I'd say this is a mid to upper five figure name so he definitely should have had no bankroll issues with it. At any rate, I just found it amusing that it seems like he's done everything right except the most important part... picking a great domain name.
Here's today's list...
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February 12, 2013
Comments (3)
If any ladies were feeling lonely for this upcoming Valentine's Day they could have had their own Penis(.net) as the auction for it at Snapnames just closed. And we'll take a look at other noteable recent sales the past month via Snapnames...
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Comments (0)
The Webfest extended auction is going on, started at 30 days and now has 23+ days left. Not sure I get the point of having an auction last 30 days. Nobody else does it and unless they are marketing the auction to potential buyers for 30 days then I see no point. As usual, bidding is slow on Snapnames, highest bid on a domain to meet reserve so far is a whopping $675 for American.tv. The auctions on Snapnames (not expiring auctions, but aftermarket auctions) platform, format, and whatever else there is really needs a change. They always (in my opinion) perform poorly and instead of improving over time it always seem to be the same. My advice, be WAY more selective on the domains. I'd rather see a list of 30 high quality domains then 100 domains that I need to sort through to filter the crap. And get some advertising for the auction. There's no excitement about their auctions.
And don't forget that GoDaddy is running a promotion good from now until February 12th where you will get 47% off your order.
Click HERE to Activate
Here's today's list...
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