Domain Magnate

I’m currently subscribed to 5 or 6 domaining newsletters and 4 of them send the emails [almost] periodically. They all go automatically to a special folder in my mailbox, called “newsletters”. Currently it has over 400 emails, accumulated in over a year.

While there is usually nothing interesting to buy for resellers, or domain flippers - if you’re looking for a good name for development, or investment it could be a good opportunity. Anyone can usually submit their domains to be published in the newsletter for a 10% fee in case of a sale an a 1-2 week exclusivity promise. If the domain doesn’t sell you pay nothing as a seller. The prices are almost always higher than what a domain would sell on the forums, or auctions, however sometimes bargains can slip through.

DomainsNewsletter.com by Kevin from BigTicketDomains.com wins the award for best prices and quality. There are names in varying price and quality ranges and with prices starting at only $50 even small time, beginning web developers can find good names to purchase. Even if you plan to find good names to try to resell to end users you may find them here. There are also frequent top quality generic domains for 5, and even 7 figures.
Kevin sent out 18 emails since I joined 4 months ago, or an average of about one email per week. However it’s not quite a weekly newsletter since there were 9 emails in March, none in February and only one in January this year.

DomainsForMedia.com newsletter by Eric Rice from DnCartoons.com is a close match by quality vs price as there are many good quality generics present for $xxx-$x,xxx ranges. The emails usually include larger lists of domains and note that offers will also be considered.
I’ve received 75 emails since joining in July 9, 2008, which is an average of about two emails per week.

The other two popular newsletters are by Evan Horowitz from HuntingMoon.com and Rock Latona from RickLatona.com.
Huntingmoon’s newsletter is notable because it lists the domains sold through the newsletter, along with prices, every month and also the pending delete domains, some with a drop catch service where to bid on them, such as SnapNames, or NameJet. Both these features are quite useful since it’s always interesting to see which domains actually sell and you have an opportunity to review some of the top expiring domains and pick some to bid on for free. The domains prices are usually in high $xxx to mid $x,xxx and vary significantly in quality, however resellers aren’t like to find bargains here, but end users can pick good names for development.
I’ve received 87 emails from Ivan since subscribing on October 11, 2008, which is an average of about an email every two days.

Rick Latona’s newsletter comes last in this review, but no the least. On the contrary it’s like the most popular one and has the highest number of subscribers. This newsletter usually includes a small section of text with Rick’s comments on latest event and links to his latest posts. The domains come in different forms, shapes and ranges. Lately also including names in other languages and tlds. Namely Spanish word domains which are usually priced at low-mid $xxx. Generally the quality varies, but there are frequently fairly priced domains almost in every email. This newsletter is supposed daily, however there are frequent brakes, probably because of Rick’s traveling. I’ve received 190 emails in little less than a year, making it about 4 emails per week on average.

And to add in conclusion: if you’re a domainer newsletters are a good place to try to sell your domains quickly, however it’s usually not the place to search for bargains.

Here is one the most elaborate bulk lowball offers I’ve received.
I want my 5 minutes spent on reading it (till i got to the $50 offer) back!
The offer was for the domain RockyHill.com and came from adams.jennifer@gmx.com - which appears to be another free email account.

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am contacting you on behalf of a small web development firm with which I work.

We have just recently instigated a development plan whereby we are slowly but surely building a large network of simple, information based websites.
The intention is to create a Wikipedia style encyclopaedia of information. The difference is however that rather than be located on one central domain, we intend to develop these sites on individual, keyword rich domains.
Our aim is to create a network such that if you want information on ‘Childrens Birthdays’ for example, then you can simply type in childrensbirthdays.com and find all the information you need.
At the moment search engines like Google provide an unnecessary middle man. We aim to make finding what you want even simpler than it already is!

We are contacting you with regards to the domain name RockyHill.com. Having completed a check of the whois database we obtained your details as being the owner/administrator of said domain name.
We are interested in purchasing this domain name from you as it is an ideal domain name for our development.

We would be prepared to offer you 50 USD for your domain name. If this is acceptable, please do let us know and we will provide information on how we may proceed.
We do not consider ourselves naive or unknowledgeable, and appreciate that some domains are being used for other things than websites: email for example, and again we appreciate that you may simply not want to sell your domain.
If this is the case we ask that you let us know such that we can pursue alternative domains.

Independent of your decision, I thank you for your time and wish you all the best.
Thanks

Jennifer

The “Dear Sir/Madam,” usually makes it all clear from the beginning, but in this one somehow it seemed like it might be a real offer. From the whois it appears that childrensbirthdays.com belongs to Rolnick, Danny from GB. But there is no way of knowing if this is the sender of the email, or they just picked a random good looking domain for an example.

All the US city domain owners have been emailed to so many times that I doubt there is any chance to buy a domain this way nowdays. The times when you could get a great bargain by emailing the owner are mainly gone and this is obviously an automated bulk email so it didn’t even deserve a reply, he can’t be seriously offering $50 for a top GEO domain like that.

After some checking I’ve found that apparently these guys emailed quite a few domainers. Some even say they only got a $10 offer, so I guess I should be happy

Got another one of those appraisal scam emails today. Luckily they land in spam folder now:

Peter Miller Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 6:31 AM
To: domainadmin
Dear sir,

we are interested to buy your domain name AARR.COM and offer to buy it from you for 65% of the appraised market value.

As of now we accept appraisals from either one of the following leading appraisal companies:

sedo.com
pedma.com
accuratedomains.com

If you already have an appraisal please forward it to us.

As soon as we have received your appraisal we will send you our payment (we use Paypal for amounts less than $2,000 and escrow.com for amounts above $2,000) as well as further instructions on how to complete the transfer of the domain name.

We appreciate your business,

Thanks,
P. Miller

Update: the keyword was announced and it’s sulumits retsambew

Net Builders will be announcing the new contest keyword today, some 9 hours from now. 10 pm GMT on March 15.

The contest would be simply about ranking in Google for that keyword 3 months from now. The person to rank the first there will get $1,000, second $500 and third $250.

As SEO contest usually are it should be an interesting experience and may show everyone some new tricks to rank better in Google. Even if you don’t know much about SEO, it’s one to watch - SEO skills and knowledge are essential nowdays for any web project to succeed. Sulumits retsambew was chosen to be the keyword people will need to rank for in order to win it.

- Top 4 letter domain at bargain prices.
- 10% discount if you purchase 3 or more domains
- Payments by paypal masspay, or moneybookers

$675 each:
ezoh.com
fpoo.com
ataz.com
ozav.com
ufut.com
enuh.com
egek.com
pirh.com

read more »

About a year ago things were quite different and domainers were encouraged to invest by ever rising prices on both short domains and generics and recent buyouts (such as LLLL.com and premium letter LLLL.net’s) which proven to be quite worthwhile. Minimum prices for LLLL.com’s reached $65 during peak times and there was a healthy supply of buyers. So back in those times it made sense to buy lots of NNNNN.com’s as well and hold them because prices would rise eventually. Which is what many domainers did buying up to 1k of them each. I had 875 of them at a total cost of around $6k - several other investors purchased more than 1000 of them and now realize the mistake and decide not to renew most. read more »

Answers.travel Sold for $3.3 million - it was first reported 2 months ago, but recently sprung a more heated discussion in sight of the depressing economy and the ridiculous amount for an unpopular extension.

Naturally this is the biggest (and possibly the only) .travel sale to date. Despite the shocker it appears to be true as was reported by credible sources: businesswire, reuters.

Different explanations were proposed, from a ‘fake sale’ to ‘money laundering’, tax evasion et. But I can add that I’ve seen enough stranger things happen in domaining over the last few years to know that anything is possible. However don’t get your hopes up, good domains are still good and bad is going to remain bad..