Domain Sales; Numbers Game with Timing & Luck

You can judge very little if any significance to value based on the number or frequency of sales inquiries.

Assuming you have good keyword names it involves mostly a matter of timing and luck to get end-user offers and sales. Depends on if a business is in need of a name at a particular moment in time and somehow stumbles across your domain which would benefit from its keyword match.

You can own excellent keyword names which are niche dominating and category killer names but never get an offer over many years or possibly get occasional lowball offers (which lowballs come mostly from domainers or non-serious end-users).

When you read dnjournal.com you may think the vast majority of names had sold for far more than what they are worth. In fact, many names which sold for high amounts may look like reg fee names or domains you would not pay anything more than $100 for but they sold for $1000s.

End-user (non-domainer) sales is little more than a numbers game involving timing and luck.

Hart to Hart by Frank Schilling

I’ve been watching lots of 1970’s TV lately. My kids really dig those easy-to-follow storylines and I love the trip down memory lane. What’s most interesting from a grown-up’s perspective is how the value of money has changed over the passage of time. A million used to be a big number in the days when Jonathan Hart flew his Gulfstream II to play poker with oil sheiks and generals. $25,000 a year was a salary that put you in the top 10%. Mr. Hart had earned his lifestyle by becoming an industrialist and self-made “millionaire”

Yesterday’s million has given way to today’s trillion and a trillion is 1 million times the size of Mr. Hart’s million. I may be an economics dropout, but my street-smarts remind me to trust the words of Abe Lincoln: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.” Abe’s turn of phrase, reminds me not be lulled into suspension of common sense, as we hear about the next trillion dollar bailout and how it will magically return us to the land of growth and normalcy from whence we came just 7-years ago.

I was living in Lyford-Cay in the Bahamas 7 years ago, in the wake of Hurricane Ivan. It’s a stepford, gate guarded compound of homes and club-buildings on the western tip of New-Providence, filled with old money, country club, trust-fund types. Nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there. One beautiful night my friend, the CEO of a major bank, who had helped arranged my temporary stay, called me to go running. He waved his arm across the twinkling star filled horizon toward a group of luxury villas: “All these people are broke Frank .. They are not productive and their wealth is slipping away without them knowing it”.

What’s more apparent today than at the time of that prescient comment 7 years ago, is that in inflation adjusted terms, most of us are working harder for less. Forget the number on your PPC stats page or the price you just garnered for that 5 figure name-sale, those dollars, euro, yen and francs you’re bringing home are buying less of what they would have bought 7 years ago. My friend had started his banking career in Countries outside the modern financial system. Brazil, Argentina and Africa taught him how fragile the global financial system could be and what it was like when the coveted “system” fails. He felt chastened by the sudden increase in the price of commodities and particularly, gold (the world’s universal currency) which had risen from the $300’s an ounce to the high $400’s in a very short time.

My friend turned his conversation from our neighbors who’s collective millions were quietly losing value, to my domain names – “How much are all your domain names worth if you have to break up the portfolio and sell each, one at a time?”. Hmmm… If I sold 10% of my portfolio and slashed prices 70%, burning the furniture to get the job done, I could probably raise about $250,000,000. He laughed at the number as it seemed implausibly large in 2004. “How long will it take you at this pace to sell them all?” Some quick fingertip math revealed that I’d get around to clearing my last great .com sale around the time I blew out the candles on my 190th birthday. Time my friends, is still the most valuable commodity. The last 7 years of money printing may have staved off an economic collapse and served to make the implausible “dollar” value of our collective portfolios seem fair, but no amount of printing can bring back the most precious commodity, the 7 years we all lost.

What we really need in the domain name business is a “productivity miracle”. A quote attributed to Alan Greenspan, I first grasped the concept of the productivity miracle during an afternoon in Cayman when a group of visitors, lay on the beach in front of the Ritz. This vacation scene unfolded out the window of my office where I had an incredibly good day domaining. Without my scripts, servers, and skills I would have needed 50 of those vacationers (and then some) to accomplish what I did that day. I added permanent value to my business, while those strangers lapped up Vitamin D and umbrella drinks. You have all experienced similar days. I “was” the productivity miracle that day. Without the productivity miracle of computers, software and programming it may have taken me a month to accomplish what I did – and I’d have missed tomorrow’s opportunities because I would never have had tomorrow free.

I continue to witness the productivity miracle in the office here in Cayman when John runs our monthly renewal list in 20 minutes, or when he gets the unlocks and authcodes for names and I run the bulk transfer script to move names over to our registrar. I see it when Ryan tweaks the traffic program and Roy and Ying roll out sales-site enhancements. I see it at InternetTraffic.com when each of you post your daily add-lists which come in like a never-ending river of opportunity for each of you. It’s heartbreakingly beautiful to watch the collective productivity of all our people and partners. All that mental horsepower (which is already focused), getting re-focused via our system. It would take all the people walking on the beach today to properly handle the hundreds of sales inquiries that the automated domainnamesales.com platform handled last night.

What this industry needs is a similar productivity miracle in name-sales marketing. So many buyers out there have no idea how to go about buying a better name. They don’t understand the value proposition, or they want a better brand but don’t understand the clerical process of getting to the point where they can put their new, shiny, better name on their business card. I am working for changes in the way we market our names. I can imagine a day in the not too distant future when domains entered into the front door algorythmic search-box at Google, Yahoo, Bing return a one-box result offering to help buy the name in exchange for a percentage of namesales revenue to the search engine that closes the deal.

Google would clearly have a massive tactical advantage with an established one-box product and their search footprint. Name-sales are a multibillion dollar annual business, and there are hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales commissions for helping users facilitate the purchase of names – and billions more waiting for the party that helps those users create hosting relationships, signing certificates, email, etc. In a perverse way it may be New TLDs which spearhead the marketing push in premium domain names. As more people take up the opportunity to buy new names at registration price, the more those people will be able to identify the good names from the bad ones – and the more they will covet those better ones.

Well, a million may not be what it used to, but the million-plus names on our platform and millions of daily unique visitors they deliver are certainly appreciated here folks. So much so, that this month we intend to pass along our next rev-share tier payout to our partners. It’s the reason your wires will be just a smidge larger than the report number in your stats this month.

As our monetization platform has grown we’ve seen a large number of naked arbitrage operators try to join us. These are predominantly small accounts, with terrible names, which miraculously get 10,000 uniques a day. We’ve kept those folks at-bay. Arbitrage isn’t a dirty word. We’re all in the arbitrage business in one way or another. When you buy a domain for 10$ per year and sell 13$ per year of traffic, that is an arbitrage play. The type of Arbitrage which troubles us is the kind that changes the characteristics of traffic.

When you buy a piece of traffic from one ad network and sell it to another network for more money you are unknowingly changing the nature of the traffic you bought. Our upstreams have told us that InternetTraffic.com has far fewer traffic quality adjustments than other platforms. We are certain that has much to do with our collective vision regarding arbitrage. Visit an arb-page and click on PPC link after PPC link to get to an advertiser and you’ll see it is a frenetic, “lean back” process which bounces you around quickly, without much effort. When a user types a domain name into their address bar, they assume a much more focused, “lean forward” stance in their chair. The effort that goes into typing a URL and immediately getting your result without changing sites, creates the impression of authority and a more sincere user. It’s a subtlety that translates into greater sale conversions (traffic quality). Time and performance have born these facts out.

When you have type-in domains you are venting light sweet crude from the ground. When you run arbitrage, you are pumping saltwater into the ground to bring the heavy oil up – or worse, fracking, to get your oil. I would encourage any of you toying with arbitrage on this platform to please move that business to another partner. We have no place for it here. Arbitrage is always there for us. We can always get arbitrage back if we drive it away. Type-in traffic operators are more elusive. They have the pure traffic and we want to continue to provide a platform where it is appreciated.

Speaking of platforms – our DomainNameSales.com platform is chugging along and doing a terrific job brokering and handling sales inquiries for our clients, without charge. I continue to generate more revenue from that machine than I do from all my traffic sales. I strongly encourage each of you to embrace it, as I have. The version I use is no different than yours. I expect within less than a year, the time you spend investing in this platform will result in you turning more deals – and at greater prices than in your previous years. InternetTraffic.com’s parking program will continue to pay more than other PPC shops, but it is our goal to unlock the latent value of domain name portfolios by closing more sales, at higher dollar volumes, more consistently, than other sales platforms. I am so impressed by our site’s utility that I think, in 12 months, it will likely be the main reason that clients beat a path to our door.

Creating a great sales machine, unlocking the value of names and traffic, opening that platform for free to the masses – this may all sound very altruistic and too good to be true. But the cold truth is that I am doing this for me. If Jonathan Hart and my friend Pascal have taught me anything, it’s that I’m not getting any younger. I have a great deal of name inventory and it is my goal to unlock the value of those assets before Haley’s Comet graces the night sky above Lyford Cay again. If delivering a great product ultimately helps you to do the same for yourself, then all the better.

T.R.A.F.F.I.C. auction domain sales were dismal

The recently concluded T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conference auction sales results were dismal!

Just reviewed some feedback and stats from the TRAFFIC domain auction and they are extremely dismal and disappointing to say the least.

Apparently there were few bidders there (some in attendance said the room looked empty) and sales were very low with just 240k sold, even after all the promo and hype (which has been ongoing for months). It was also odd for names as low as $200 selling, which lower quality names I was not aware could be listed at TRAFFIC conferences.

The fact online auction bidding was not allowed was no doubt a big negative and quite ironic and surprising since they are selling Internet names but at the same time contrarily not wanting to do that using the Internet as a venue to supplement the in-person bidding!

Diverse Portfolio of Health & Wellness Domains

Just wanted to let anyone who may be interested in acquring health domain names and websites that our health, wellness & disease portfolio of domains and websites is for sale.

It’s said to be the best large and diverse portfolio of targeted traffic health domains available. More information can be found at HealthWebsites.org, or listed for-sale at: Flippa.com…

Low Price .US Domains are Getting Flipped a Lot

Over a year ago we decided to let expire more than 50 mostly bad or dubious value letter dot-us names that we had been holding since as long as the year 2002 when most of them were acquired. We dropped them due to no traffic or income, plus poor acronym use potential.

It has been quite interesting watching the majority if not all of that group sold, resold, resold, resold and sold again on the domain name forums between domainers.

The sale prices are mostly between say $5 to $20. What makes it even more interesting is what with the low prices I don’t see how the domainers are flipping them for a profit and if they are making some money doing that it would not seem to be worth all the time and effort involved. It seems there is no end in sight as I again see many of them posted for sale again on the forums by their latest owners.

Traffic/Revenue Doesn’t Matter in High Value Sales

A question we have always wondered about is why at Flippa.com it seems buyers place great value on website traffic and revenue stats, with little if any intrinsic value for the domain-name itself?

However, with the just announced big sale by Rick Schwartz (DomainKing) for 4 million dollars plus stock for the two domains property.com and properties.com, their traffic and income was in all likelihood not a factor in the sale.

In fact, that issue was probably not even discussed, let alone a real consideration with the offer and purchase. Obviously, properties.com and property.com traffic/income was insignificant vs the very high sale price.

Category defining: CorporateCommunications.com

The category defining name to own if you are in the corporate communications business. Owned since 1999. Sharp price reduction: For more details and to possibly buy or make an offer please click-on the picture below…

This name was verbally valued at approxiamtely 500k to 600k by a domain broker in 2009 who now works as a broker for a major domain firm.

Eric Borgos Interview by Michael Cyger

We can highly recommend this interesting and educational interview with Eric Borgos conducted by DomainSherpa.com and expert interviewer Michael Cyger: Eric Borgos interview

A Recently Discovered Quality Domaining Site

Just finished listening to the new DomainSherpa.com interview with well-known domainer Justin Godfrey. Just in case you are not familiar with DomainSherpa.com it’s a relatively new site operated by Michael Cyger. I have spoken to Michael and listened to his informative and educational series of interviews.

By the way, Michael has excellent interviewing skills. His interviews also benefit nicely from their length since they are 1-hour or longer which time allows Michael and his guest to cover a lot of information in that time (compared to much shorter Youtube videos).

It’s also quite interesting how the video interviews are of such good video quality from a basic service which most of us probably already have on our computers. After seeing how good the split-screen videos are I asked Michael about the technology thinking he must be using a top-quality video production system and was surprised the video quality is from Skype.

The most interesting part of the latest one-hour plus interview was how Justin Godrey purchased the domain name Snowmobilers.com for just $500. The name had an equally surprising low asking price of only $900 which Justin received in reply to his email. I doubt I would even bother try to get a better price as he did with that amazingly low initial asking price.

How is that possible when the name is likely worth so much (I would estimate at mid-5 figures or more). Justin was certainly lucky with that one. Why does that kind of luck never happen to me?

Negativity by Paying Domain Broker Upfront Money

Sometimes domain name and website owners may wish to hire a domain brokerage to sell their names or websites. I can give you some good advice (gained via my personal hands-on experience) about that, including a warning about paying any upfront fees to the broker.

Keep in mind, once the domain-broker has your money a good degree of the incentive to work hard and sell your domain or website may be lost since the broker already has his/her money, regardless of the name selling or not selling.

One more potential negative occurrence is the once friendly relationship you had with the broker may quicky go away if there are any business or personal issues involved. That can easily happen as a result of the broker already having your paid in advance monies so he may decline to issue a refund if you are later unhappy with his work and perfomance.

More information about why you should never even think about paying a fee in advance to a broker (which we published over a year ago) as part of a post about the category defining premium domain names LiveApp.com plus LiveApps.com both being available for purchase, located here: About Domain Broker and Live App domains for sale .

A good article about domain brokers was recently published in Elliotsblog.com in which Elliot lists domain name brokers. I know several of the same domainers/brokers and can suggest the following domain brokers, which Elliot listed in his post:

• BigTicketDomains.com – Kevin Leto
• DifferentInvestments.com – Justin Godfrey
• DomainBroker.com – Rob Sequin
• DomainsForMedia.com – Eric Rice
• MediaOptions.com – Andrew Roesner
• NameConnect.com – John Daly

By the way, Webtrading also offers a domain brokerage service (mosty for our own websites but the brokerage service can also be used to buy domains belonging to other parties), which you can learn more about by clicking-on the image below. In addition, any comments you may have about selling domains and websites, or regarding domain brokers will be appreciated.

Domain Name News & Domain Blog Aggregator

Keep up-to-date with the latest and best domaining news & blog headlines. DomainingRoulette.com is a 24X7 Real-Time Domain Name News Feed and Blog Aggregator, offering live late-breaking domain name news from the international domain and website community.

There is no membership requirement, no account required, no login, no need for personal information, no advertising and no spams.

By visiting DomainingRoulette.com you can quickly view and read the most current headlines and blog articles. As far as we know, DomainingRoulette.com is the only domain name blog and news aggregator without any advertising on its pages. That way the visitor experience is a good one and is unblurred by distracting or confusing marketing and advertising.

Domaining Bloggers are also wanted. Please Submit Your RSS Feed now…

High Priced Domain Name Pricing Model

The concept of asking a very high price for low or moderate value domain names is used by both Marchex and Frank Schilling’s Name Administration. In the past I tried to buy a few names (which if they were my names would be asking under 1k) but Frank wanted a minimum of 8k firm or even more, and would not budge a bit or negotiate the price.

Of course, that’s their business decision and a business model they apparently are following. With that said, in view of the fact they do want to sell domains, we do not see how Marchex Inc or Frank Schilling could possibly be selling many domains since I feel their prices are even more than end-user domain values.

In addition, they make you jump through a bunch of hoops, stumbling blocks and complexities before you can even make an inquiry, making buying from NameAdmin even more unlikely vs if their pricing was more realistic or flexible.

We will appreciate any comments you have about Money Matters, which feedback we could also add to our web site as we are looking for money matters and monetary ideas to expand the web site.

Domain Inquiry Sounds Better vs Domain For Sale

There has been talk on the forum boards about the best way to place a notice on your website that your domain name is for sale. Fabulous.com does a good job combining PPC ads with a domain for sale announcement page and developed a type of hybrid between a parked page and a sales page. With that said, ‘This Domain Name is For Sale’ notice does a fairly good job of getting people to make offers, but there appears to be a better way.

That Fabulous page is a good approach but I would like it even more if the banner said “Domain Inquiry” since I believe “This Domain Name is For Sale” notice will detract from the the visitor experience and potential visits to your advertisers (at least to to a degree) since the page may have has less crediblity due to the site/domain being offered for sale. The words “Domain Inquiry” has a less obvious negative meaning to a web-surfer, imo.

Any reviews, comments or ideas you have about how to effectively and professionally sell Internet domain names or websites would be appreciated. Thank you.

Do Websites & Traffic Add Major Value to Prices?

There has been discussion on domain-name forums and blogs about developed websites adding significant value to domain names, and also making the domains easier to sell plus sell for a higher price. Agree to a degree, a developed web site with traffic is of high overall value. However, with that said, based on hands-on experience, I can say end-users rarely if ever care about the traffic your domain or its website gets, and in fact don’t ask for any statistics. Even if you offer them your stats, they don’t want to see it.

In view if the above I am unfortunately somewhat dubious about a developed website (with good traffic and typeins too) being more appealing to end-user buyers and the price they will pay for the domain, at least much beyond intrinsic value. Potential end-user buyers may actually be a bit negative about an existing web site and as a result its pre-branding.

Please note that my comments do not indicate I am negative about developed websites, or do not greatly value traffic. The exact opposite is true, since I have a number of developed sites which I am very happy with, most of which get good search-engine traffic, enjoy the benefits of high SEO rankings, plus receive natural typeins (from Internet users like President Barack Obama, pictured below, likely looking at a health website)…

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?

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