Domain Magnate

BankRate Inc made a few surprising purchases lately, paying millions of dollars for small one man sites.

First was CreditCardGuide.com, a site that provides credit-card comparisons. According to compete.com it receives close to 200K monthly visitors from US. Still hard to imagine the site revenues being able to justify the $32 million pricetag the company paid a month ago. 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 »

An interesting series of posts by Rick here:

What makes a domain sellable?
What makes a domain sellable part 2
What makes a domain sellable, part 3
What makes a domain sellable, part 4

Some good tips there and I can agree with most. Domains with clear and obvious use are much easier to sell. They are however harder to find at good prices.

Short domains may have less possible development ideas, but they are a great collectible item which value will only go up.

New LLLL.com PriceGuide by Reece is out

 As can be seen, prices have stabilized and are no longer fluctuating significantly in either direction, which is a good indicator of a healthy market long term. Lately, there have been far more lower quality LLLL.com sales than there have been higher quality LLLL.com sales, so I’ve been forced to remove the upper percentiles to avoid giving major confusion to what higher quality premium and pronounceable LLLL.coms go for.
The quad premium market continues to perform abysmally, while the pronounceable and rare markets seem to have stabilized, much like the low end. Min wholesale on quad premiums is approximately $330, identical to what was reported in the previous 4 Letter Noob update, however prices nearing the minimum appear to be occuring considerably more frequently.

It’s been 100 days of blogging on DomainMagnate.com today, since then I posted 166 posts and here are the most popular ones:

• Chess.com - How a Premium Domain Should Be Used
• Why LLLL.com Domains Will Grow in Price
• Top .in Domains Owners
• AARR.com, DDRR.com, Bulg.com, NNPP.com, Slov.com, OOOM.com, Lidy.com, RonF.com, Xosi.com and many more at good prices!
• NNNNN.com Countdown Approaching 10k
• Many LLLL.com Possibly Stolen: EGF.com, Sibe.com, gmeil.com, elli.com, gtoy.com and more..
• Interview With DomainBits by DomainMagnate
• The Hidden Potential of CVCV.com

A recent interview with Rick Schwartz posted over at Search Feature:

Mike Dammann: How did you get the idea to start the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Domain Conference and Expos and how close are you to the search engine industry?

Rick Schwartz: It started as a 12 person get together at my home. When 35 wanted to come I hooked up with my Attorney, Howard Neu, and decided we needed a venue other than my house and an agenda of activities and discussions. When 135 signed up we got THRUST into the convention business. 6 months later we held our second TRAFFIC show in Las Vegas and this time 235 showed up. By the time we have another show in Florida a few months later, we were 350 strong. So it was never planned, it was needed and we just took the ball and ran with it.

After 10 shows we have established ourselves as the key event in the space and thousands of domainers and investors have come to one show or another.

As for the search industry, it is an industry having more and more in common with domain owners. In our show in May in Orlando we will have at least one SEO panel and in future conferences even more as our channels overlap more and more. read more »

A great post from Lord:

This is My True Story

There was a time when I was extremely frustrated with my domaining business. I was seeing people sell domains for hundreds of thousands of dollars and yet I had so many domains which no one was willing to pay even registration fee for, let aside thousands. What was worse was that I was not making much money in parking either.

Whenever I saw the domain-sales charts I would cringe. What was I doing wrong? Was there a fault in my investment strategy? I had to do something about it or simply get out of domaining business. It was a do-or-die situation for me.

There is another thing — I hate failing.

So, I sat-back to take a rational look at my investment strategy and find out what was wrong with it. And very soon I did. read more »

Hey all,

If you haven’t noticed I’ve been adding and testing some wordpress plugins and additions to the blog.

So far added:

• Related posts plugin to show related posts under each post with excerpt
• Show Top Commentators - to show top visitors of the blog that left most comments this month
• Subscribe to comments - to let my readers subscribe to comments for individual posts in order to track responses to their comments.
• AutoTag - creates tags based on yahoo keywords. These tags are then used to extract the related posts.

I’d appreciate any feedback and tips on new plugins to add.

Interesting and informative post by Sahar over at conceptualist.com:

Looking at our top domain names, here are some patterns we may all learn something from:

1. One or two word generic (descriptive) domain names, all .com

Self explanatory.

2. Traffic is usually strong and/or constant.

Massive traffic on some of the single word domains (hundreds or thousands of unique visits per day) isn’t unusual however, the more traffic a domain has the less targeted the likelihood. It is unusual to find domains which have a lot of traffic and are also extremely targeted and commercial. Those domains, if you are lucky to ever find one, can do thousands of dollars per day with a simple PPC page. read more »

Conceptualist reports that

 

Via Texada’s press release (PDF):

TEXADA Software Inc. (TSX Venture: TXS), premier provider of equipment rental and mobile asset management software, today announced that it has sold the ownership of one of its Internet addresses for $400,000. read more »