How much of each domain is worth depends on how it's being sold. For example, I was asking a domainer how much my domain eskimokissing.com would be worth the other day, and this is what he told me:
If it expires and drops, 300 - 600 dollars.
In a wholesale liquidation of an entire portfolio: 800 - 1200 dollars.
On it's own, with a list of 50 potential companies that you're willing to cold call, and you've put in the work to find the right person within each company: 6,000 - 20,000 dollars.
The above scenario, but if there is a bidding war between two or more companies: 15,000 - 40,000 dollars.
So the answer is basically it depends how much work you are willing to put in to sell them. With some of these domains it's clear that you can put together a list of 100 leads if you're willing to put in 10+ hours per domain, but with others I would guess that you would probably have to liquidate them at bargain basement prices to get any money back.
Domainers are so silly. The value of your domain is what someone is willing to pay for it and what you said proves it: If you bother to find the people who want it then they will pay for it. Saying $15k - $40k is also silly, because it matters what the specific companies are. A bidding war between a small corner shop and a family owner jewellery store won't reach the same as Apple vs. Google.
"So the answer is basically it depends how much work you are willing to put in to sell them."
The value is what someone is willing to pay for it, if you can find a good end user who desperately wants it and has money then you can sell it for lots, but the money you make doesn't scale relative to the effort you put in, just like with any commodity like housing, cars etc. I can't sell a beaten up old ford focus for $1m because I spend 60 hours a week for a year finding a buyer.
Personally I doubt your domain would clear >$100 in a sale.
That keyword term only gets 210 searches a month, and there is no real way to monetize it...short of just doing a blog.
I'd say that's worth 200 bucks tops...and that's with bidding to drive up the price...since you'll have a hard time finding people actually wanting to get it.
You may well be right, that's just what I was told. The logic was that it's a dictionary term, and so a company like Eskimo Pops might want it for a marketing campaign. Or maybe some sort of adult site targeted at women, that was the other angle.
I think you have liquidation and expiring wrong. Expired domains generally command higher prices than you can get on the aftermarket from resellers.
Why? I am not really sure, but I would hypothesize that the demand is most highly concentrated at the major drop sites. They also facilitate transactions more smoothly and uniformly. Big players don't have to muddle around with lots of individuals, they deal with one company who takes giant checks from them and are assured the domain and no drama every time.
>Expired domains generally command higher prices than you can get on the aftermarket from resellers.
Don't expired domains lose big time SEO by getting classed as "new" in SE algorithms though, I thought that was why they lost value. This assumes you've got something on there that's keyword relevant already I think.
I suspect the majority of the buyers aren't looking at the SEO value. Also, most of the better names go through pre-release instead of actually dropping these days. As far as the penalties, I don't know for sure how and which names are affected.
I'm still waiting for domain valuations to eventually plummet, as it just doesn't seem that people navigate to sites that way. The only thing that it provides is lower barriers to come back for a second visit.
I used to be more likely to click a link on Google if the domain name looked more authoritative. So, a lot of those common names with high prices would seem to be valuable for that reason. And, I think Google ranks sites higher if the domain name has the keyword in it.
These days with so much spam, I try to avoid domain names with my search keyword in them.
One of the valuable ones that I can spot is daz.com, "Daz" being a popular Procter & Gamble brand of soap powder (at least, in the UK): http://www.dazwhite.co.uk/ - I'd guess they'd quite like the .com for their brand.
If anything I'd think the existence of Daz as an existing brand devalues it. Daz is a nice, pronouncable three letter domain but if someone were to buy it with the aim of developing it they may be put off by the prospect of P&G lawyers trying to strong-arm them into handing the domain over.
The domain was regged in 1998, and if the TM was registered after this date then it should be okay.
There are pushes by some US law makers (e.g. the silly Senator Olivia Snow) to change this so that TM holders have much more rights over domains, even if the domain existed before the TM, but for now it should be fine.
Would be worth consulting a domain lawyer if an offer is made for it though.
I see these prices as a clear sign that the current DNS system needs to be replaced. It's ridiculous. They are driven up by "scarcity," but there isn't any real deficit. Names are just letters and numbers, and there is infinite number of combinations, there is virrually infinite number of relatively short combinations.
The biggest problem, as I see it, is that there are only a few TLDs, none of them are very meaningful, so it all effectively converges into a single namespace.
If there were TLDs like .games, .mag (magazine), .press, .news, .comp and so on, no single domain would hold so much "value".
For companies, you could have a reserved .corp TLD where every entry has to be verified (so only a registered business with matching name can own it). For products, you could have .prod.
They are working on that and I think it's a terrible solution. Here is why: consumer's want life to be easier. Remembering the name of every company and then adding .com is hard enough. Now I have to remember companyname.companyextension? There have been plenty of TLDs launched which all just failed. .biz anyone? .info?
The scarcity isn't artificial, it's the limited amount of recall a consumer has for information.
I don't think it's fair to say that they (ICANN) are doing what I've described above.
ICANN's policy:
- Create close to one new TLD a year.
- Either make it converge to the same logical"namespace" (what's the difference between .biz and .com?) or make the new TLD highly specialized and charge "premium" prices (.mobi).
This does not alleviate the "deficit". For example, if you own food.com and someone else buys food.biz, you're in conflict. Solution? Offer lots of money for food.biz. Oh, but there is also food.mobi! You company has a mobile app, right? So you try to buy buy food.mobi as well. The system encourages you to hog the domains.
What I've described:
- Make a large number of TLDs available at the same time.
- Make them describe the type of content the server works with.
This would create a multitude of logical namespaces, which would drive the prices down. If you own food.review and someone else owns food.wholesale, you're not competing for the same name any more. This wouldn't completely remove contention, but it would reduce its intensity.
As for remembering domains, I don't see how adding meaningful TLDs would make it harder. Is food.review really harder to memorize than foodreview.com?
First off, there is a whole debate about launching hundreds of new TLDs going at ICANN. It's pretty much the hottest issue there is. They are trying to do exactly what you're suggesting, a registry free for all.
Second, yes, food.review is harder to remember than foodreview.com. Trillions of dollars have been spent branding .com into consumer's minds worldwide (also local ccTLDs in some country trump .com because of use/adoption). Wait, did I want food.review or food.guide? or was it...? People do get confused by URLs, having the same TLD (.com/or whatever your country uses) makes it easier to remember for average consumers. The biggest thing I think a lot of people here forget is, YOU'RE NOT NORMAL. Average consumers aren't hanging around at HackerNews, a site for the tech elite, and their behavior doesn't match this audience (you).
There's certainly artificial scarcity caused by people buying up domains and then sitting on them and doing nothing. I have a side project I've been working on where I'm blocked in deploying it because I haven't been able to find a good domain name that isn't taken. Now, none of the domains I've thought of are actually being used, but they've mostly been registered for ~10 years by people who apparently have no intention of actually developing them. In a couple cases, they are listed as for-sale, but people are asking tens of thousands of dollars, which I simply can't afford for a side-project in a very niche market.
You're not launching because you can't find a good domain name? Sounds more like an excuse than anything else. I see about a post every month on HN about how someone creatively found a good domain name, but you're here complaining everyone wants 10's of thousands of dollars for them. Hate to say it but average sale price on Sedo (one of largest domain markets) is only around 2000$. Plenty of names to be had at reasonable prices, and plenty of creative ways to find ones available to register.
Yes. I have a full time job which I have no intention of leaving. This is a personal-itch side project that I spend a couple hours a week on, at max, with a really limited potential market. If you want to be constructive, I'd love to have links to some of the posts you're thinking of or suggestions of "creative" ways to find available domain names. That said, even $2000 is more than I want to spend on this.
Hey, if you aren't too paranoid about it, send me an email with some details of what kind of name you need, what niche you're targeting, etc.. I've been pretty good at brainstorming up good domain names for friends' projects over the years that aren't registered yet. No promise I'd come up with something for you, but if I have a few minutes to procrastinate I can give it a shot.
It's getting harder, certainly, but sometimes you luck out.
Domains are worth whatever a buyer is willing to pay, not what people in this thread or automatic tools on the internet believe/suggest.
I've had domains that I hand-registered in the last two years sell for 4-5 figures and other that according to experts/tools are very valuable, but that simply do not attract any buyer.
And I'm not even a regular domain investor (or domain squatter as people on YC seem to believe all domain investors = squatters).
Anyway, I think the blog poster has a pretty good idea of what his domains are worth, but he's just trying to raise attention and possibly start a bidding war on the 2-3 interesting ones. Some choose to do their auctions through auction houses, other uses more creative forms.
Speaking as someone with a fair bit of domaining experience, unfortunately a lot of the domains listed are worthless, with the exception of daz.com which is a 5 figure domain, ww.com which is a 5 (possibly 6?) figure domain, secondhandcar.com which IMO is a 4 figure domain, webcamsoftware.com which is 4 figures, and a few others which hold a <$100 value. So there are some valuable domains, but the majority are worth $0 in my opinion. (Note: I don't mean to sound insulting when I say they're worthless - indeed, I literally mean it that their valuation is $0).
It's also worth noting that the domain industry got hit a fair bit by the recession, and it's possible that some of the above domains would sell for slightly higher than the rough range I've given (espeically the two 4 figure domains I quote, which could go for low 5 figures in the right circumstances).
It's quite common to see people (as the blog post says) regging domains on a whim since they look good, but usually such domains regged on a whim are worthless. And unfortunately it does seem to be the case here.
Anywhoo, I'll send my semi-informed appraisals along to the blog author now. I've been a domainer since I was 16/17 (am 20; 21 next month), so whilst I'm not an expert or anything, I have a fair bit of domaining experience and hope my appraisals are somewhat useful.
And I'd possibly advise that he looks at DNForum.com and NamePros.com (the two big domaining forums; the former is paid-only though) a little bit to get a general feel of domain prices.
...I thought of posting a few I was curious about as well, but that would get silly pretty quickly.
Just about everyone here probably has 5-10 domain names (if not more) that they've registered somewhere along the way with a side project in mind that hasn't materialized yet.
I personally am wondering if anyone knows of a way to put a domain name in escrow -- I had an offer for one of my domains from someone with a side project, and tried to work out a solution where he could have it for free, but if his project hadn't gotten any traction after a few years, it would revert back to me (since maybe I'd have found time for my own project by then...). No dice, though; he didn't know/trust me, the legal aspects were too confusing, and so on.
daz.com and ww.com are valuable (~$100k-250k), the rest he'd be better off keeping.
secondhandcar.com could be valuable to the right person. You could probably get $50k from the right buyer.
The rest are nice, but not "must haves". Unless a domain is rare and generic its not worth > $10k. Color.com, Mint.com, Tires.com are rare and generic, most of these are not.
Can anyone recommend a good domain name marketplace or auctioneer that doesn't have some kind of volume requirement? I merely want to unload a single domain name that I think stands a chance to chip in on my DSLR habit.
If it expires and drops, 300 - 600 dollars.
In a wholesale liquidation of an entire portfolio: 800 - 1200 dollars.
On it's own, with a list of 50 potential companies that you're willing to cold call, and you've put in the work to find the right person within each company: 6,000 - 20,000 dollars.
The above scenario, but if there is a bidding war between two or more companies: 15,000 - 40,000 dollars.
So the answer is basically it depends how much work you are willing to put in to sell them. With some of these domains it's clear that you can put together a list of 100 leads if you're willing to put in 10+ hours per domain, but with others I would guess that you would probably have to liquidate them at bargain basement prices to get any money back.