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Domain Names Worth Their Weight in Gold Again
prostoalex writes "So far in 2006 domain name on.com fetched $635,000, Macau.com was sold for $550,000, blue.com was sold for half a million, and Jasmin.com was bought for $310,000. With the exception of the last domain name, which is currently used for erotic video chat, the rest of the domains run some sort of domain parking ads. USA Today talks about revived interest to domain name trade, and companies like Marchex, a 'leader in vertical and local traffic', which happens to own a .com domain for every single zip code in the United States. There's also a report that in the few days that .eu domain names were made available, 1,454,218 European domains were registered."
Yesterdays news was showing how someone got shopping.eu
According to the report an independent institute valued the name at 300000 €
-- ubersonic Kfz Versicherung
"... how are those [Gooogle] inane squatter pages better than the link farms that Google frowns upon?"
Their income goes back to Google.
That was to expected from a company that went public and reports to their shareholders. Lots of money and values don't go together.
Here's a few of the names I registered and never made a cent on:
BudgetDSL.com
BudgetDSL.net
Artoo-Detoo.com
See-Threepio.com
InstantOnPC.com
NoBootPC.com
EarnPage.com (wow that's dumb!)
DSLCheap.com
DSLCheap.net
MartianSprings.com
19x.net (I let it lapse, but I'm thinking I should have kept it... even for email, a 3-letter domain is cool.)
PeeRat.com !!! (yes!!! Pee Rat! Actually I was thinking Peer At. Shows what registering names at 4 am can cost you.)
I regged a bunch more, some of them probably ok (something with fix.com in it... I forget... hmmm.) I regged at least 50 over the years, and only one has turned out to have any value.
This space available.
Then we had click-through, and advertisers paid for "clicks". Now we have "click glut", very few clicks lead to a sale, and the bottom is falling out of "clicks".
What we're going to end up with is something where advertisers only pay for actual sales. This creates accounting problems, but Yahoo Store and parts of the porno industry already have it working.
The main thing keeping the click trade going is Google. When the day comes that Google stops paying affiliates for clicks, others will follow and the domain spam industry will fall apart. This will probably happen right after Google gets a payment system in place.
Just recently, I learned *far* more than I ever wanted to about attempting to claim a domain after a previous owner lets it expire. It's amazing what a racket that whole thing has become!
One of my clients paid a consultant to set up a web site and some email hosting for his daycare centers a couple years ago. Well, recently, that consultant ran into some personal problems (divorce, etc.) and became very difficult to reach/unresponsive. So finally, the daycare owner decided what he needed to do was redirect the registered domain to a new location, build a new site, and have it hosted elsewhere.
Problem was, the consultant registered it under his info, and we had no real way to obtain the password to make the changes needed.
Luckily, I noticed the domain was just about to expire, so I decided to keep an eye on it and planned to buy it upon its expiration. Now, the *traditional* rules say domains are back "up for grabs" after about a 30 day grace period, after expiration. But nowdays, it seems most registrars don't play fair. Instead, many just transfer the domains to their name, and sit on them indefinitely - charging an inflated price to re-purchase them. (I guess the line of thought is, if a name was good enough for someone to pay to register it once, then it's got an above-average chance of having some value to someone else - or even to the same person if they just let the renewal slide....)
In other cases, the expired domains automatically get put up for auctions to the highest bidder. (Some registrars like GoDaddy let you bypass this step by paying a $25 or so fee while the domain you want is still in their "grace period", but of course, that still means you're paying about 5x as much as you would have if it was some random name that was never registered before - AND, you're forced to become a captive GoDaddy customer in order to get it.)
The ones in auction can *really* turn into a money-grab, because companies have been formed to do nothing but automatically bid and re-bid on your behalf, for a stiff up-front fee, promising they'll guarantee to get you the domain you want. (Basically, if you're a normal human following manual bidding procedures, you're absolutely going to lose to their mechanized system.) You're fine if you're the only one bidding on the name you want -- but if it's a reasonably attractive/popular name, it can escalate into a very expensive bidding war involving 3rd. party services really quickly.
Question: Do you actually own the domain name Microsoft registers "for" you? Microsoft says you can transfer in a domain if you so choose, but funny enough, they mention nothing about letting you transfer the free domain out if you are unsatisfied with their services.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I mean seriously, I constantly have customers coming in fretting about domain names. One chap sits at the visitor PC and spends hours (literally) trying different iterations of common words, and combinations. This is just silly. I tell them to relax, the name really isn't important. Content is king on the internet, the name doesn't matter a damn.
Lets take our favourite website, slashdot. What exactly does that have to do with technology or news? Nothing, and yet its one of the most successful sites out there. Google is a verb, for gods sake, and its domain name has exactly zero to do with searching. If these guys had their way, it would have been called simplysearch.com or something. One of our most successful websites LIreland the domain name doesn't mention anything to do with driving or driving schools.
This domain name hunting fad will be consigned to the murky annals of bankruptcy before too long, as more and more useful, content rich sites gain a reputation and a following. Meanwhile, trust me, the name doesn't matter a damn.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
And you talk about suing over copyright infringement. Suppose some hobbyist named Bill McDonald had bought McDonalds.com before McDonald's decided to get on the internet scene. Should they be able to sue Bill for copyright infringement? I should hope not.
As far as mcdonalds.com goes, it should probably go to McDonalds Inc. instead of Bill if we examine this simply from an efficiency perspective. Almost every reader visiting the page is expecting the company, not the hobbyist. DNS is, after all, designed to make things easy on the reader.
A more interesting example would be delta.com. Airplanes? Faucets? Power Tools? Most traffic is going to Delta Airlines, but there are still plenty of people in the world whose first reaction to "Delta" is thinking of some other company.
Does it seem like Books.by.net and Music.by.net or adult-oriented content addresses like Porn.by.net would be valuable?
.com names are worth considerably more than .net. But consider a marketing campaign for a company that is selling cars online, by web or by net so to speak. A TV ad could say, "Shop for a new car at Cars by net," while showing "Cars.by.net" on the screen.
It is generally the case that
Sure, "Cars dot com" works as well or better, but that one's taken, and so is almost every other "Product dot com" domain. So the question is, would "Cars.on.com" be better than "Cars.by.net"?
Which is the more valuable domain space?
I'm asking sincerely, even though I have a self-interested motivation in doing so. I've literally been told by some appraisers that By.net should be worth 10-25% of what By.com would be, and it just doesn't make any sense at all.
Peace and love, y'all
First domain - 5 dollars
Second domain - 20 dollars
Third domain - 50 dollars
Fourth domain - 100 dollars
Subsequent domains - 1,000 dollars
Sure, you have the problem of people registering things under other people's names, but that can be solved.
Essentially, your e-mail and personal identity domain should be basically free, your first and second hobby domains should be reasonably priced, your third and fourth domains should have a lot of motivating factor behind them, and if you need 5 or more domains you're probably a very large company with a lot of people working for you.
The ______ Agenda
I want a Firefox plugin that blacklists parking domains the way Adblock blacklists ads. So that if I try to go to one of those pages it just warns me that it's a parked ad trap and allows me to choose not to go. Better yet, let the search engines screen the blacklisted sites out for you.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Are surely much more valuable domain names than amazon.com, google.com, and ebay.com? The thing no one has explained to me yet is are these idiots making money squatting on all these domains? Or is this like all those "work from home" things, where none of them really make any money, but the meme of the multi-level marketing thing is infectious and spreads prolifically? Same question could be asked about spammers, how many of them make any real profit, and how many more are either spamming at a loss or at a rate less than they could make the kwikky mart per hour? Seems to me if these things are all as usually un-profitable as I imagine we could educate away at least some of the annoyance caused by spam and domain spam etc.