Buying, Valuating, & Trading Domains

Photo By Rivo

Googling “Sport Flyers” returns almost 400,000 results. Most of these belong to radio controlled groups for various locations. The model airplane industry is fairly popular, and even if this name isn’t used for that purpose, it is generic enough to belong in the aviation industry. The FAA now offers a “Sport Flying” license that is not as expensive and less technical than a regular aviation pilot’s license. We ourselves would LOVE to own one of these.

That said, we expect this domain to go for a lot more than our budget allows, but we’ll be watching closely.

Maybe it was the fact that their soccer team came up short against Germany, or perhaps it was the fact that they don’t want to pay $100,000 to own the domain extension “.Turkey”…  but Turkish hackers kidnapped the ICANN.com website today. They placed the message:

“You think that you control the domains but you don’t! Everybody knows wrong. We control the domains including ICANN! Don’t you believe us? haha (Lovable Turkish hackers group)”

Long story short… looks like Turkish men make better hackers than soccer players. Something tells us that we might be seeing the “NetDevilz” group in the news again in our future. While we don’t condone hacking, we did kind of have to chuckle a bit since we’re semi disgusted with yesterday’s ICANN announcement.

We still don’t know the whole skinny… all we really know is what we’ve read on CNN. But we’ve got to think that existing domain investors can not be happy about the latest news coming out of the Paris ICANN conference. As the values of their portfolios will surely drop as additional domain names/extensions become available within the industry.

While the rules may become more relaxed, you’ve got to wonder how many new issues and fiascos these new rules will create… You think there are copyright infringements now, just wait until you can go out and buy “ThisDomain.Microsoft”. We’re sure ICANN and the registrars will create a way to manage/prevent these things, but like we said in our last post, this brings dilution to the domain market. Bryan Glick of Computing Magazine is quoted in the article as saying “All the meaningful words and meaningful names in the English language have been bought up already”… we have to disagree. That is why there is an entire resale market of domain names out there. That is why there are additional domain extensions, that is why companies are forced to get creative and think outside the box. Diluting the domain name market will just make it harder for users to really find what they’re looking for when they’re on the web.

Relaxing these rules will bring a lot of questions to the domain community. Questions about fairness, questions about security, questions about legality and copyright… Nothing that the domain industry hasn’t seen before… but this step could be a huge shift in domain name ownership. For the big money guys out there, ready to jump into it all… get ready, you’re about to become even more rich.

We haven’t posted much this week… mainly because we haven’t been too enthused with the current auctions. Except for Bido which had some sweet action on CerealBox.com today for almost three grand. We personally think someone overpaid for that domain, but then again, you never know, a domain is what you make of it. And furthermore, a domain is worth what someone is willing to pay for it. For us, we’ll just leave our laptop closed in the morning and stick to the back of our standard Lucky Charms.

We caught an interesting article today on CNN about ICANN possibly opening up A LOT of extensions to domain names. You can read it here. We’re not exactly sure what to think about this… besides the fact that it will muddle the market more than it already is… swell (note: insert sarcasm here).

Finally, as a treat for not posting much this week, we leave you with the best site in the world. “BestSiteInTheWorld.com” that is… which is currently on auction for 9 more days, and we put in the initial bid for $15. Who wouldn’t want to own the best site in the world for fifteen bucks?

Two generic names, “QualityStyles.com” and “GuestChoice.com“, are currently out on TDNam. Both have 6+ days left in auction, and both are currently listed under $20. Both are generic enough that they could apply to just about any product or industry, and they could be used in marketing campaigns or product lines. We’ll be bidding on/watching these over the next few days.

Update: QualityStyles.com sold for $251 and GuestChoice.com sold for $158 … nice prices on both generic names.

Photo By Omar Omar

We just went under the seven hour mark and got outbid for “loanoffer.com”. It jumped from $330 to $770 dollars. We set our cap at $650 so we’re done. We knew it was lowball for us, but secretly we hoped that we could sneak away with it because there hadn’t been a ton of activity on it. That said, there are now 10 bids and we still expect the price to go much higher.

Update: Sometimes you would like to think you’ve got this domain valuation thing figured out… but the bottom line is that “a domain is as valuable as what someone is willing to pay for it”. That said, we were right to bold the word “much” in our post above. The domain received 35 total bids (more than 20 of them occurring within the last ten hours) and sold for a final price of $22,000. It did have a total of 129,000 Google page links to the site, and it was the number one result for a “loan offer” search. So we knew it wouldn’t be cheap, but we didn’t expect it to climb that high. It will fit nicely into someone’s existing loan business or high dollar domain portfolio. Congrats to the heavy bidder!

Bido.com, a new “one-a-day” domain auction site, launches its first official auction today. Congratulations to them! We picture it as the “Woot” of domaining. And we love Woot. Their first official site on auction is DiscountImages.com which we think will sell at around $1200. It could be higher just based on it being their first auction.

Bido.com is affiliated with DNZoom.com which is a domain name aggregation tool. It allows various API’s to connect with various registrars to help you manage your domains in one location. We’ve tested the tool and have mixed reviews about it, but we think they’re on the right track, and definately suggest you try it for yourself to see if you like it. Here is a nice interview with Sean Stafford about Bido.com and DNZoom.com.

Update: Only four bidders participated in Bido.com’s first ever auction: Federer, Sid, Homey, and TheMadHat. They combined for 20 bids and a final sales price of $911. Congrats to the winner we think that was a very reasonable price!

Photo By This Particular Greg

Yesterday we blogged about a pretty cool video game code, today’s domain that we’re watching is actually a generic name for any code. “EnterTheCode.com” could be used for a marketing campaign that requires the consumer to “enter the code” from the product into a website. The site could be used multiple times, and basically could apply to any product. It is easy to remember and only 12 characters long, so we think it would be a good buy for less than $300. We’ll have to wait and see what it actually goes for…

The auction currently sits at $36 with 5 bids and has approximately 7 hours remaining.

Update: This auction closed with 8 bids at $131. Congratulations to the winner. We think it is a great domain name at a great price (wished we would have bid a little more…)

We’re always looking for funny or odd domain names… most of the time this is tested first by just typing in the name. It is always amazing to come across a name that you would have never expected to have been taken… but it is. For example,

http://www.upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbabaselectstart.com/

For some of you that don’t know, this is a famous cheat code to the original Nintendo game “Contra”. Probably the most famous video game cheat code ever, but we never would have imagined that someone would have bought it as a domain name. Awesome!

Our latest two purchases come on closeout buys. Things lately have been quiet on the auction front. We bought “WeddingCeremonyInfo.com” in the event one of our family members or friends decides to have a wedding, and we bought “AirforceDad.com” because we have previous enlistment and parenting experience.

That said, the other big auction we’re watching right now is “LoanOffer.com”… current bid is at $200 with approximately 2 days left in auction.