I picked up a couple of blogs in my RSS reader over the last two weeks: Frank Schilling’s Seven Mile and Rick Schwartz’s blog.
For those of you who don’t know who those two gentlemen are, they are two of the biggest names in the business of domaining. Frank’s portfolio of domains is worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars (and he only got into the game in 2000) and Rick Schwartz is the guy behind T.R.A.F.F.I.C., one of the biggest conferences on domaining (like what SES Strategies or PubCon are like to SEOs and webmasters).
It’s interesting what we can pick up from some of their thoughts in terms of choosing a domain name. A generic domain name like CubicZirconia.com or CellPhones.com can bring in thousands of pre-qualified customers 24/7. That’s why CellPhones.com was sold a couple of years ago for something in the neighborhood of $3.6 million. Every day, people would bypass search engines and type directly into the address bar of the browser “cellphones.com” to look for cell phones. Then they would click on PPC ads which paid the owner $1,900 a day.
Here’s an article from Business 2.0 that examines the world of domaining and is a fascinating read. What were you doing in 1995? In 2000?
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If only…I’ve got what I thought was a great domain name http://www.text-maniac.com - it is pretty neat, and maybe there’s a writer out there who’d be interested in buying it, but I doubt it’s going to get millions of daily visitors!
All offers welcome!
db
As with anything…
A good domain name is worth the least amount it would cost to replace it with something else that works as good if not better.
The same with fast food workers. They get paid the least amount that it would cost to replace them with someone else as good or better.
Some people seem to think the domain name is the least valuable part of the website. I don’t agree with that at all.
$1900 a day? From one site? Nice work if you can get it.
I guess something like that is the dream site that everyone wants in their portfolio. I dream about grabbing some name for a product that doesn’t exist yet. I know the day that Microsoft announced the new ‘Zune’ MP3 player I quickly snapped up three premium domains. Of course at the moment their not too hot but I’m just hoping Microsoft can bring out a knockout version 2 and it’s popularity will skyrocket.
I think there are still opportunities out there but not the easy ones like just taking eatingdisorders.com or something like that for $12 a year. There has to be some analysis as to whether even a $100,000 domain name is undervalued. Someone may be able to take that $100,000 domain name and recover the cost in just under a year depending on what is done with it.
$1900 a day just for picking a great domain name? To do that today, you’d have to channel Nostradamus and pick something that’ll be hot in the future. Hmmm, how about AntiGravityCoffeePots.com?
I have had tremendous luck with domains, and as of this writing, I own 455 of them.
When buying a domain, I look at five things:
1. The current search volume of the search string according to Keyword Discovery
2. How I intend to monetize it, and the expected LTV of the client that I would acquire with the domain.
3. The latent “brandability” of the domain (ie, “Is it already something that exists within the mind of the target prospect, and is this what they would likely enter into a Google search box if they had a problem I could solve but did not yet know that I’m the guy to solve it.” It’s easy to brand MarketingHeadhunter because everyone already knows what that is. I am merely co-opting a generic term.)
4. The consistency between what the customer needs and the type of text backlink I can build with the domain. For example, by being on the web at MarketingHeahunter.com, my target buyer searches for “marketing headhunter” … and my blog fans back link to “marketing headhunter” … and therefore I become the nexus of all things “marketing headhunter” on the web. That is why I occupy the first several spots in the organic rankings for “marketing headhunter.”
5. The likelihood that I could resell it if I needed to.
I also look at what people are paying for the keywords for that domain. For example, I think “Marketing Headhunter” is fetching a couple of bucks per click on Overture. Nice to know when I am buying a domain.
All of my domains satisfy all of these conditions, including …
* http://www.MarketingHeadhunter.com
* http://www.SearchEngineExperts.com
* http://www.EcommerceRecruiter.com
* http://www.EcommerceConsulting.com
* http://www.ManagementRecruiter.com
* etc
Do yourself a favor: Buy a good domain name — and one that is a dot-com domain without the hyphen.
Thanks for the Tips dot com is always gonna be the best
CellPhone.com would sell for triple that price today! The value of premium domains is increasing faster than most could ever imagine. .com is not the only extension with any value tho. .tv, .info, .mobi, .org, .net & ccTLDs (such as .de, .us & .co.uk) all have their place on the net.
After a little research, it seems that CellPhones.com sold for $4.2 million & CellPhone.com sold for $7.5 million recently. Still bargains IMO, but we’ll just have to wait and see!
Check out worthfish.com for appraisals of lower end domain names. Obviously names like cellphones.com are impossible to appraise by an automated service but its neat to see what names are worth. Its free btw.
Do other domains not ending in .com sells in Millions ? I don’t remember any domain ending in say info sold for big amount.
Check out NameBio.com for recent domain sales.
I know Poker.de sold for $957,937 in 2007-07-18
NOTE: Not all domain sales are listed there. Many deals are made privately, e.g. the CellPhone.com & CellPhones.com deals.
After having a look through the list, apparently Golf.TV sold for $600,000 in 2003-02-01. Sex.net for $454,500 2006-05-19. Hotels.eu $329,509 2006-08-29. Blackjack.de $300,000 2006-06-20. RealEstate.net $300,000 2007-02-06. Flowers.mobi $200,000 2006-11-25. Shopping.eu $196,803 2006-08-29. Chinese.net $180,000 2007-08-08.
Of course the majority of high figure sales are in .com, but the internet is still very much in it’s infancy. I personally believe there is huge potential for niche markets such as .TV for video sites, .mobi(le) for specialized mobile sites, plus some of the other global extensions (I know .TV is meant for the country Tuvalu but “TV” is known world-wide so I consider it to be a global extension if marketed correctly, which I think is happening already). Country code domains will grow in value too, IMO.
Just my 2 cents.
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