Domain Magnate

After I’ve added many of my top LLLL.com domains to sedo I keep getting large number of annoying lowball offers.

Seriously people, if you’re going to lowball at least don’t send funny offers of 75 and 175 euro for domains that are worth at least low-mid 4 figures. Offer $500 or something, you might even find someone who doesn’t know the real value and buy.

But with low offers like that no one would even reply because you’re clearly not serious. By being too gready you just lose many potential deals.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a domainer, I lowball all the time time too, but not like that. This is just ridiculous and here is why. There may be one person in 10000 inquires who’d sell his $2K worth domain for $100, but then there are hundreds who would take $500 for it. In both cases your profit is similar: $1900 and and $1500. But instead of wasting time searching for that one “sucker”, why not get many other good deals instead and potentially much bigger profit by spending less time..

DomainNamenews reports:

As heard by our staff at the DomainRoundtable conference in San Francisco this week, it is rumored that TrafficZ (or it’s parent company Thought Convergence) is buying NameIntelligence, the parent company of the DomainTools.com website and organizer of the DomainRoundtable conference. The price is said to be 16-18 million USD. TrafficZ also is one of the main sponsors of the Targeted T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conference & expo.

DomainTools are widely popular among domainers and I’m also a subscriber mostly for their domain history feature. Such an acquisition would definitely bring many new customers to Trafficz parking and is a great investment imo.

There is a discussion about the news on DNF 

I was just checking the recent sales of cvcv.com at tdvr.com and noticed a strange thing.

Both sold on sedo, same week, almost same letters and similar quality, yet such a big difference in price, why?

“Fehu” has 162K results in google and there is a developed site over at fehu.org, with alexa below 1 million, so it has some traffic. It also seems to have some mystical meaning, but that can hardly contribute much to a reseller price. read more »

If you, like over 95% of other domainers, want to develop some of your domains with minimal effort and expenses into a site that can bring revenue, here is one of the best and easiest methods: Set up a bidding directory.

What is a bidding directory?

It’s a regular web directory based on the auction system. Webmasters can submit their links and the links with highest bid will appear on the frontpage of the directory. For example here is one of mine: Casino Bidding Directory, as you may see the highest bid is $100, and the lowest bid on the main page is $60. So a bid of at least $61 is required to be listed on the front page. Minimum bid to submit a site to the directory is set to $9, and you can see that most bids listed in categories are about that amount, for example in advertising

The main advantage of a bidding directory is that its completely automated. read more »

Many top names are being auctioned through various venues this time.

Sedo leads the way, with such gems as:
xp.com
xu.com
zr.com
bond.com
directories.com
resorts.net
nicole.com

Also, as usually, a few names with super high reserves that don’t have much chance (although we’ll likely see them shill bidded to the reserve by the end of the auction):

vino.com 200,000 - 499,999 $US
housewares.com 1,000,000 $US +
vinos.com 50,000 - 199,999 $US read more »

Dollars.com didn’t bring the top dollar many have expected and fetched only $500K euro on the recent greatdomains.com auction run by Sedo.

Considering it was previously sold by rick lotuna for $650K 10 months ago, the current owner just flipped it for a lousy 10% profit, after the sedo fees.

For comparison another similar high value “flip” computers.com brought the owners $2.1M on a TRAFFIC auction half a year ago, making it about 80% profit in less than a year, based on the reports of the price they paid for it earlier.

The current GreatDomains auction had a large amount of very high value names.

Another interesting sale reported by sedo: c4.com for $107.5K

This posts discusses the unique potential of the top quality CVCV.com names and provides valuable tips and updates on where to get them at bargain prices.

LLLL.com remains the most frequently traded type of domains between domainers on the forums and it’s thus important to know the prices and be aware of the market trends and potential.

High end 4L.com’s names, mostly cvcv.com had the highest increase as of lately and it’s not surprising. There are only 2500 quad premium (e.g. only containing the premium letters: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, T) CVCV.com domains (consonant, vowel, consonant, vowel, e.g. topa.com, dola.com, nama.com etc.). Out of these names containing H and F are lesser quality. Another 2100 cvcv domains consist of the above letters and one of: U, K; which are considered the best of the non premium letters. And add to these another 1500 domains including V, or W and some of the above mentioned letters. In my opinion these 2500+2100+1500 = 6100 names are the top of the creme 4 letter domains. Other letters: Z,X,Y,J,Q are usually harder to make a brand of and are less attractive to a western, English speaking person. read more »

It was reported today on DNF that a large amount of quality LLLL.com domains were stolen, among them egf.com, neoo.com, elli.com, gtoy.com, lave.com, sibe.com, ftc.net, 3004.COM GEHO.COM, gmile.com, mopi.com:

The domains as shown below were transferred illegaly on 13,14,15 April,2008 by unknown domain hacker.
The original legal owner is Goi Media(Heongho Kim),he reported all suspected fraud to the cybercrime police and consulted a lawyer about the case.

Currently,the cybercrime police investigate this case seriously.
The owner submitted the domain list to the police,and opened to the public to prevent the hacker from reselling them.

Therefore,the legal owner warned anyo read more »

Would you tell us a few words about yourself? How long have you been working in the domain and web hosting industry?

I have been with Dotster in the domain and web hosting industry since it was privatized in 2000. During that time, I’ve been fortunate enough to have been part of several industry firsts, including the first namespin algorithm, auto renewals, the first shopping cart and the first expired domain auctions.

Under my tenure at Dotster, the company has thrived and has grown to become one of the largest registrars in the world. Dotster has helped almost one million businesses and individuals establish a read more »

Qualified businesses and professionals can reserve their business names, trademarks, and personal names on a first-come, first-served basis prior to the rule changes using EnCirca’s ProForwarding service (http://www.encirca.pro). Trademark owners may protect their intellectual property in advance of any rule changes by using EnCirca’s ProForwarding service as well.The dot-pro public comment period is over and RegistryPro and ICANN have received overwhelming support for their proposed changes to the dot-pro registry. The public show of support takes dot-pro one step closer to enabling all licensed professionals from anywhere in the world to register dot-pro domain names that work just like dot-com domain names.

Dot-pro currently supports Lawyers, Medical Doctors, Accountants and Engineers. Examples of businesses and professions that will soon be eligible for dot-pro include: Architects, Dentists, Educators, Chiropractors, Veterinarians, Surveyors, Plumbers, Inspectors, Investment Advisors, Real Estate Brokers, Insurance Brokers, Nurses, Opticians, Optometrists, Podiatrists, Psychologists, Therapists, Social Workers, Building Contractors, Electricians, Patent and Trademark Examiners, Court Reporters, Police and Fire Safety Officers and any other profession where an official credential is required for a business or individual to offer services.

Qualified businesses and professionals can reserve their business names, trademarks, and personal names on a first-come, first-served basis prior to the rule changes using EnCirca’s ProForwarding service (http://www.encirca.pro). Trademark owners may protect their intellectual property in advance of any rule changes by using EnCirca’s ProForwarding service as well… more