Dallas Cowboys Alleged Domain Price Stupidity

Part of the problem with domain name disputes and domain complaints is the fact so many companies are unwilling to spend a fair amount of money buying already registered domains to protect their valuable brands.

A more or less perfect example is how the Dallas Cowboys representatives made a bid of only $275 (really $275 and not a misprint) for the great Cowboys.com domain name at an auction when other auction bids were in the general area of 200k or higher.

However, strangely the Cowboys allegedly grossly misunderstood the auction price level (in spite of the fact a series of auction bids had worked their way up to more than $200,000., while they were present in-person at the venue) but somehow were oddly thinking a bid of just $275 would buy that great domain. Isn’t that amazing! They say the truth is stranger than fiction. A story like that is so far fetched it could not be made-up!

There is a TV show about the World’s Dumbest and the Dallas Cowboys reps at the domain auction (who I heard it said at least one was a Cowboys attorney) should definitely be on that show based on the alleged auction bidding events.

The proposed world’s dumbest appearance would include the upper management where for just 275k (which should be insignificant to an assumed billion dollar plus business) they later cancelled their absurd $275 bid after being informed the bid should have been $275,000.

This incredible true story about some of the alleged dumbest people on the planet is very hard to believe but this did in fact happen a few years ago.

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Is It Still Possible to Register Domains with Value?

Is it possible to freshly register domain names of value (which may not necessarily make you rich) but have some value, and can make you at least a bit of money?

Rarely a week passes where we do not stumble upon at least a few unreg’d names which I am sure would get natural traffic plus search traffic too. We can’t possibly register them all (there are simply too many good ones) but when we do register the available domains there are often typein visitors to the temporary webpage right away.

Anyone else run across good targeted keyword unregistered domains lately?

Domain/Website Resale Markets Are Depressed

A domain name forum menber asked about more than unusual numbers of non-forum threads and posts lately and was wodnering why that seems to be taking place? My answer is maybe it appears that way because the domain name/website resale market appears to be declining big time and since so few are successfully selling (with the notable exception of the many which somehow almost magically sell in the DNjorunal.com sale reports each week for surprising prices) forum members have little to do all day except pass time with the non-domain related posts.

An example of how hard it is to sell at forums these days I was checking yesterday and see a majority of believed dubious or marginal value names I let expire (and got zero responses on via the Forums, or thru the Whois contact information and at other venues such as my Websites) were in fact puchased by others at places such as Snapnames.com, for example, and at for high prices vs the small amounts I would have quickly taken for them (even though I rarely offer names or websites for sale). I also see BuyDomains.com ended up getting many of my cancelled names. Really odd the marginal names appear to rarely sell at forums and via for-sale-listings at auction websites for a fraction of the prices many domain sellers would have accepted. Anyone know why?

Jets.com was a great bargain at only $375,000

To someone who may not be experienced with domain name values the internet domain name Jets.com recently selling for 375k must seem like a ton of money. If it was purchased to try and take advantage of the New York Jets football team as was once commonly believed (until the actual buyer became known) and maybe to run some sports advertising on it and make a few bucks from running PPC ads (and taking a chance on a big trademark lawsuit or WIPO case), then I agree that 375k is a lot to pay.

However, the name was purchased by an end-user firm who rents jets and other airplanes according to what I see on the website today. Since jets both rent and sell for big and small fortunes the price was incredbly low. I believe just one sale or a few 25-hour rentals of a corporate jet would probably recover the domain purchase price in profit or commissions. After the first few transactions take place from the website traffic (and its typeins) it will be all gravy for a lifetime for the lucky owner and and 100% profit with every future airplane transaction. So the price was in actuality a tremendous bargain.

The new jets.com web site offers these prices: U.S. 2009 Pricing: 25 HOURS CARD MEMBERSHIP. Aircraft Price. Hawker 400 XP $114,500; Hawker 800 $125,000; Hawker 1000 $149,000; Gulfstream III $189,000; Citation X $189,000; Challenger 601/604 $199,000; Gulfstream IV $279,000.

This is what Yahoo! Answers says about the costs of jets: “Best Answer – Chosen by Voters: (buying and owning a jet) is very expensive considering all the FAA rules on rebuilding engines every so many hours whether they need it or not and a pilot is gonna cost you in excess of $100,000.00 per year and then you have the hangar charges which are like $3,000 a month, and then jet fuel which was $3.79 a gallon and then the insurance is expensive . There is an old saying at my rolls royce dealership – if you need to ask the price or the gas mileage you can’t afford it and I have found over the years how true !!!!! Byy the way cheap starter jets can be bought used for like $300,000.00 and up whereas the new ones like a 4 seater are probably going to run 1.5 million dollars or higher to start.”

It’s Always Tough Giving a Buy Price or Sale Price

One of the the most frustrating things about the domain name and website business is that in the normal course of business (even if the name or its website is not listed for sale) there will be occasional unsolicited offers to buy your domains and/or websites but most everyone has great reluctance to make the first move regarding a sales price.

In all likelihood, the typical great reluctance by both buyers and sellers to name an agreeable price results in the large majority of web site or domain-name potential transactions failing.

A prospecive buyer does not want to give a specific offer because of two reasons:

1. The prospective buyer is thinking the offer may be more than sellers expected price so seller will accept it right away and he would pay more than was needed.

2. Conversely, buyer is thinking his proposed price is too low so seller may act negative and not respond at all or else act insulted replying with a sky high price of say $50,000 for a domain he really would normally sell for $5,000 or less as an example.

A potential seller does not want to give the buyer a specific buy-it-now price due to two reasons (this is especially applicable if the buyers full identity is not known):

1. Seller may be thinking the accepable buy price is lower than what buyer was really willing to pay. Thus buyer will accept the price and domain or website would get sold for less than its potential price.

2. If proposed buy price is perceived as too high by the potential buyer it may turn buyer negative and buyer will nt reply at all. That would be unfortunate since seller may in reality accept much less than the quoted high price but never has a chance to negotiate the price since buyer already walked away or went on to an alternative name for sale or a newly registered domain.

Not really sure what solutions there may be to this ongoing problem, which in-effect stands in the way of a great number of sales. Anyone know a way to avoid this?

Lower Domain/Website Income vs Higher Costs

Most everyone in the domain name and website development industry is reporting sharp declines of from 65% to as much as 85% in Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising Revenues compared to a few years ago. The income declines appear to go well beyond the overall decline in the economy, with several other factors involved in the big declines.

Making matters even worse is the future scenario of sharply higher cost domain name yearly renewals since it looks like the domain registry operators will be able to soon charge whatever they want for yearly name renewals, with non-fixed and non-regulated pricing looming on the dark horizon.

The double edge sword of low income combined with expected greater costs could easily put an end to the domain name industry as we now know it. Comments on this bleak outlook are welcome…

Sales Should Be Atributed to the Correct Website

Regarding domain name sales reports I noticed AfternicDLS gets credit for more sales than deserved. For example, I personally purchased a good health related dot-org domain last week but it was listed in DNjournal.com as being sold by AfternicDLS (even though Afernic.com had nothing to do with the process). It appears credit for many of the sales in both DNjournal and in other media too are often attributed to Afternic when the BuyDomains landing page was responsible for the sale, having nothing to do with Afternic’s name.

The name above and several others I have purchased this year were always a direct result of typing on the domain name and seeing the BuyDomains landing page. The landing page has the BuyDomains phone number at the top announcing the name is for sale and inviting a phone call to the BuyDomans toll-free number, or clicking the link for more details or making an online purchase it goes to the BuyDomains.com website, with Afternic not mentioned on the web-page from what I can see. In fact, I don’t believe Afternic is mentioned at all during the sales and ordering process which appears to be done only under the name BuyDomains.com

Of course I realize they are both divisions of NameMedia.com but it seems like the Afternic.com website gets undeserved credit for far more sales than warranted and greater marketing benefit than is due them. In fact, I would be willing to bet BD landers are responsible for many sales, especially to end-users and higher priced domains) compared to Afternic which is believed to have a lot of sales mostly to domainers and resellers.

The reason we mention this is that Afternic.com is obviously getting more marketing and advertising credit plus greater overall publicity than justly deserved for domain sales. On a more personal note, I dislike the Afternic.com web site which has been riddled with various bugs for ages, lacks certain important features such as bulk operations, and unfortunately has offered poor support for a long time). In fact I removed my domains from there some time ago.

Good Domains for Websites Sold for Under $1000

It’s interesting how the BuyDomains.com reported domain sale prices (substantial $950,000 total sales last week) vary so much. Some names which were reported as sold by BD last week stand-out as really good domain name buys based on end-user product sales possibilities, combined with their low sale prices and good keywords in well paying categories (such as in the financial markets for example).

Knowing to a degree how BuyDomains and Afternic operate I am sure many of these domains were purchased by website developers after successful email or phone price negotiations with BuyDomains and Afternic (which flexible pricing they typically offer) with the intention to make money from the future targeted websites using good keyword domains purchased at reasonable prices, including these examples.

The best buys are domains which are also in high-paying product categories, names such as AnnuitiesAdvisor.com ($900), DomainFutures.com ($488), FreeTradingSystem.com ($440). InternationalAssetProtection.com ($688), CommunityCollegeStudentLoan.com ($488) and CanadaHotelReservations.com ($450).

Those nice domain names were all priced reasonably at under $1,000. In fact, in my opinion, that low-priced group of names are better than many of the names which BuyDomains.com sold at much higher price levels last week. That may or may not be an anomaly but I would not be at all surprised if it was really a common occurrence since so many dubious value names are sold on a daily basis from what I can tell.

The Secret Identifying an End-User vs a Domainer

A “domainer” is a person or business who invests or trades in domains with the goal of reselling them for a profit, flipping them, or buys domain names mostly to park them with a domain parking firm running so called “Pay-Per-Click” advertisements on the web-pages with generating income (getting paid when a visitor clicks on ads on the page) in mind. Some domainers are also developers in the sense they develop a number of so called “minisites” which are small websites (often 5 web-pages or less).

A major intent with minisites is also to receive PPC income (typically from Yahoo or Adsense ads appearing in the pages), or from Affiliate program sales. However, some minisites may also offer various products and services for sale, often accompanied by advertising. Sometimes the minisite may be developed to help enhance the value of its corresponding domain name and bring traffic to it since it has been developed and may be listed well in the search-engines as a result of development and search engine optimization (SEO) work.

An end-user is much more likely to pay a significantly greater price for your domain vs much lower price offers you will get from domainers. That is to be expected since the end-user buyer is much more serious about putting the domain name to good commercial use compared to a typical domain-name investor or domain speculator.

Now for the secret to being able to successfully say with good accuracy the sales inquiry you received is from an end-user vs a domainer. The obvious way to figure it out is what is commonly done such as “googling” the persons name or email address and looking for other clues involving the identity of the person who has inquired. Those methods may or may not work well and often are unreliable.

The secret we have discovered over the years follows Occam’s Razor theory in that sometines the most simple answer is the correct answer. For more on Occam’s Razor please visit Occam’s Organization. So our secret is a true end-user will rarely if ever ask questions such as how much traffic or how many visitors does the domain or website get? What is its revenue? Where do the site visitors come from? Does it get typein traffic? How consistent is the site traffic? etc…

If you get questions like that it is quite likely you are dealing with a domainer or domain investor. If those question are not asked it is real likely the inquring party is a true end-user, who will in all likelihood be prepared to pay substantially more for your domain name or website vs the average domainer.

As to why it matters that much to know you are dealing with an end-user, it’s based mostly on the fact an end-user buyer is significantly more likely to pay far more money vs a domain name investor. That more than likely scenario is to be expected since the domainer wants to buy at or near a wholesale pricing level compared to the retail price range end user buyers often are willing to pay. That variation makes a major difference in the domain/website selling or not selling and in its final sales price .

Lowball Offers are Not Necessarily Starting Points

Some folks claim lowball offers for domain names are simply a starting points and a negotiating method to initiate negotiations, with an assumption both parties realize the real value of the domain.

The “starting point” view doesn’t work too well with me. If I start out with a reasonable offer of say $800 (not desiring negotiations) for a name which I feel is really worth no more than $800 (especially without any known traffic) and the seller counters with a price of say $11,000 I know right away an eventual sale is most unlikely, if not impossible.

Actually had that scenario happen recently when the owner later wrote again asking me to make a new higher offer but I countered with a new lower offer of $400 due to the declining economy and lesser desire for the name vs originally. He then indicated maybe he would take a price much closer to my original offer after all if I had not gone down in the offer, to which I said no more higher offers and the domain sale negotiations were therefore finished.

Getting Out of Bed for Buyer Offers Under $500

A well-known highly successful large domain portfolio owner and domainer RickLatona.com recently proposed on his blog that buyers make a low-offer such as $50 when interested in starting negotiations to buy good domains.

Personally, I don’t think starting out with a low-ball offer to buy a domain/website is a good strategy, assuming you are seriouslly interested in buying the domain or web site. As evidence of that it certainly would *not* work if you want to buy one of my good domains/sites since most all the time I don’t even bother to respond to low initial offers.

I will never forget a Sedona Arizona real estate investment class I attended 7-years ago which was conducted by a well known local attorney. He said he does not even bother to get out of bed for anything less than $500 (referring to his legal fee). That figure seems to me like the absolute lowest offer which carries at least a little credibility with it involving most non-blue-chip domain names.

That not bothering to get out of bed view (for a small amount of money) is often applicable with buying/selling domains too. If you have lots of expenses and ongoing concerns about revenue issues (as in-fact I do) you really need a substantial sum of money to help financially, or make much of a worthwhile change to your lifestyle. The fact the the offer to buy was a ridiculous price normally indicates (at least in my view) the seller was not a serious buyer.

Internet Intellectual Property domain/site for-sale

The subject of Internet Intellectual Property and IP Case Law is a legal field which is rapidly growing in popularity. Exactly what is Intellectual Property? IP Property is a product of the intellect which also has commercial value, including trademarks, copyrighted property and material such as literary or artistic works, and ideational properties, including patents, appellations of origin, business methods, and industrial processes.

Webtrading has owned the highly targeted domain name InternetIntellectualProperty.com and its website since January 2000. During that long time the web site has slowly built-up traffic visiting the site and its rankings in the search engines. Our Internet Intellectual Property domain-name could easily be a leading IP Industry Legal Authority and IP Information Source in the future assuming a larger website with far greater content and functionality was online.

This domain name (with the current small website included) is now available to a buyer or internet investor for a reasonable cost. Its value has been estimated to be in the $15,000 to $20,000 price range. Be sure to contact us if you have interest in buying InternetIntellectualProperty.com – a unique internet-domain-name opportunity.

Proposed real-time domain forums daily list

It would be great to have a live real time updating daily list of all domains listed for sale posted by the popular domain name forum boards. This proposal is especially relevant to the more popular and fast-paced forums such as dnforum.com and namepros.com where it can be challenging to locate the somewhat rare good quality but reasonably priced domains of interest to the buyer.

A good approach would be for each forum to run a script which at midnight deletes the previous days for-sale list and replaces it with a new real time list. As threads are started with new domains for sale the domain(s) and link to the thread are automatically added to the days list which is refreshed many times over the course of 24-hours. The price bracket or type of sale would not matter in this proposal as all domains listed for sale would be shown and only listed alphabetically.

Other benefits (in addition to its main benefit of fast access to the domains listed for sale) are avoiding misc clutter, bypassing other posts in the same thread, less background noise (and seller embelishment and marketing copy) with a simple listing of domain-names listed for sale during each 24-hour time frame. Thus, a name of interest could quickly ‘catch your eye’ so to speak by scanning thru the domain list.

By clicking on the provided link to the sales thread you can get more details on the sale. You can then make a fast offer or buy at a ‘buy it now’ price (which is always what I personally prefer doing because I rarely if ever will make blind offers). To avoid search engine indexing of the list (which some domainers feel uncomfortable with) the proposed domain for sale list could use the format example-dot-com

Why am I posting about this? Because it’s so difficult to stumble on the relatively few good names listed for sale compared to all the others. For example, there have been a couple good names I would have loved to buy recently but what with all the ‘background noise’ when I first bring up a forum in the morning it takes a long time to locate those “good” name (especially when using Today’s Posts as I usually do). By the time I see a ‘good’ name which I like it’s often already been sold.

Just one actual example from this week is a name which sold for low-xxx but I would have paid mid-xxx for it if only I had seen the sales thread quicker. If this proposed real-time domain for-sale list was operational I could acquire a domain which I like and is in a category in my business plan, and the domain seller would have received more money for the domain, in this week’s example roughly $200 more in the sellers pocket. That scenario has happened many times over the years at the domain forums.

Domain Name Registration

Before you can even get started with a website you’ll need to go through the process of registering a domain name. If you’ve never registered a domain name, you’ll realize that there is not one set company to use for domain registration. There are a number of internet providers offering domain-name registration and each company has their own set prices. The domain regsistration cost can range from as low as about $8, all the way up to as much as $35 per domain name registered, per year.

When you are first getting started with domain registration, you’ll also find that many of the names you would like to register are already taken. This name shortage can be indeed frustrating, but due to the internet being around for over 15 years, the vast majority of dictionary-based internet domain names are already registered.

The most popular domain name extensions are:

.com:  This is the original and most popular domain name extension. By default most people expect websites to end with .com, so you should always do your best to register a .com domain extension, especially since dot-com will get more so called “typein” traffic from folks typing-in the words they are looking for (without spaces) in front of the dot, followed by the extension which will frequently be .com. With that said, our website traffic research indicates dot-org is second in typein popularity behind dot-com.

.net: Most people consider this domain name extension to be the second best among domain name extensions. If you are unable to secure a .com with your chosen name, then you can go for a .net or .org, and consider other extensions such as .biz or country-code domains including .us (United States).

.org: This domain extension was initially setup for non-profit organizations but may now be used successfully by for-profit business too. The dot-org extension carries with it a nicely perceived degree of trust and a non-commercial connotation

.info: This domain extension is for “information” type websites and is usually the lowest price of all extensions

.biz: The idea behind .biz was its potential use by businesses based on the biz-business connection. Dot-biz recently appears to be getting more popular.

Some other domain name extensions are .me .tv .name along with many country specific domain name extensions including the very popuar .de (Germany), .ca (Canada) and co.uk (United Kingdom). When conducting your domain name research you’ll able to search for your name and you’ll be provided the results of if the domain name is available with your chosen extension. If not available, you are usually given the option to view if any other extensions are available for the selected name.

A simple search for “Domain Registration Providers” using Google will provide you with a list of companies to choose from for your domain registration needs.