Domain Magnate

I’m finally getting more into developing my domains and at first I’m planning to build a few small adsense sites on the city names and generics.

Here is one I did this week BethelPark.com – Bethel Park is a city of 33.5k people in Pennsylvania.

This one is a small site with 10 content pages. I’m currently testing different templates to see what gives the best ctr, but I think this one should do good. The trick is to make ads blend in and fit the theme. read more »

Here is the recent registrations stats for End of June 2008, or the latest data available. Top 3 tlds, .com, .de and .cn make up over 100 million domains, .net pushed to the 4th place.

We can see an enormous growth in .cn registrations, but this is mostly due their extremely low price. Many sites offer Chinese domains for just $0.13, yes, 13 cents only!

.co.uk is now slightly above .org and with UK pound going strong unlike the US dollar, the recent week’s sale of Phones.co.uk for $345k and LegalJobs.co.uk for $40k in addition to the previously reported sale of Cruises.co.uk for $1.1. Million comes to show how big the .co.uk tld is.

Apotheke.eu (“pharmacy” in German) sold for $81K last week and as the EU expands and grows tighter we can expect the .eu names to grow as well.

.asia is the new kid on the block and while many consider this new extension completely useless, there was one good sale in dnjournal last week: LasVegas.asia for $30k.

No it.s not WhiteCity.com, actually it’s the real city this time! As msnbc reports, also spotted on unplain

CARLSBAD, N.M. – White’s City, a tourist town at the entrance to Carlsbad Caverns National Park, has been sold at auction for $1.55 million.

Higgenbotham Auctioneers International says the community and the surrounding 366 acres were sold Monday. The company did not release the identity of the winning bidder.

White’s City includes two motels, a recreational vehicle park, a museum, retail shops, a gasoline station, an opera house and a water park. read more »

Sedo is notorious for making sellers pick low reserves to “encourage more bidders” and while it sometimes work, frequently there aren’t enough bidders in the first place, so names end up with low prices. This mostly refers to GreatDomains auctions.

Next GreatDomains event has these names in the list, among others:

Attended.com no reserve
Calcium.net $1-$499
Debbie.net no reserve
Doctor.net $5,000-$9,999
Illicit.com $1,000-$4,999
Doorway.com $1,000-$4,999

Now some of these reserves are just ridiculously low, someone will get bargains!
I think low reserves only hurt the sale, there should be either no reserve at all, like on snapnames and bido, or a fair reserve like there is usually in TRAFFIC auctions and good sedo auctions. Low reserves will just reduce the domain’s value in the eyes of the buyer. A quick example is when I recently sold my coriander.com for just $5100 on greatdomains auction with reserve $5k, after it went up to $9k on a sedo auction previously, shy of reaching its reserve. There are simply not enough bidders to create a bidding war to get the price up, especially now due to summer, recession, election, global warming..

I think this was a clear marketing success for bido. They managed to sell a two word .org domain for almost $2k.

Honestly it’s a good domain, but I’m not sure how it can be used, besides by some kind of organization that is keen on keeping secrets, or on the contrary revealing them. Might also fit for an entertainment site.

But still, that’s the price I’d expect from the .com!

Over $25k Domains Sold on BQB in June. Reece published the full sales list

Most were definitely great deals, such as:

13 LLLL.com 205.00 USD
16 Triple Repeat LLLL.com 10,000.00 USD
BBBD.com 785.00 USD
LLLF.com 655.00 USD
LLLM.com 678.00 USD
OOOM.com 1,025.00 USD read more »

Webmasters.org Bidding on sitepoint auction Reaches $38K.

It gets up to 10k pageviews per month, but only $25 monthly revenue. This is definitely a nice domain, with great potential as a webmaster community portal, but even with that it’s a very high price for a .org.

What helps is that it’s a pr7 and the site has many links. read more »

Anything.com has a great portfolio of top generic domains. Picked up from a post on conceptualist.com and urlacademy.com

read more »

The moniker.com auction from the Geo show in Chicago just concluded with a total of $284K of domains sold.

While there were some good sales, in general I’d say it didn’t do that well. Many people got bargains on city domains

Here is a list of all the domains that sold:

SantaClara.com                         $82,500
Afghan.com                             $30,000
Asia.org                                  $30,000
OysterBay.com                          $24,500
Guatemala.net                          $16,000
Cuban.com                              $15,000
Secaucus.com                           $11,000
SaintKittsAndNevis.com                 $10,500 read more »

Hoce.com

Amazing 4 letter domain, over 6 million results in google, premium cvcv.com.
Also a first name.

here are only 2700 premium cvcv.com domains and you can buy one of them here, it has great collectible value and also brandable and easily pronounceable.

Crazy bin for today only, $2750 + escrow fees (or paypal masspay)

At this price it should sell quick, post sold to claim the domain! 

Another similar name hopa.com sold for $15,000.00 on afternic this week.