Domain Magnate

There has been an unusually high amount of clearance sales and cheap lots posted for sales lately. People are likely coming back from the summer vacations and discovering that the renewals are coming, so trying to sell some names cheap and quick to raise money. This is the perfect opportunity for low budget domain resellers and flippers to go bargain hunting.

Before you dive into this it’s important to not get carried away buying too many domains, so check each one carefully.

How to evaluate the names?

• Google search counts estimation tool – as the main tool to estimate the popularity of the keyword
  
• WordTracker free search counts tool with Google Trends – to get a “second opinion” on the search volumes
  
• Google.com – to check for potential end users, advetisers and evaluate competition for the keyword terms
• Estibot Sales History – containing the largest history of reported domain sales it’s a great tool to see what people are buying
• Your Common Sense – sorry, no link for this one, you’ll have to Google it yourself..

Where to find them?

• DNForum Fixed Price Under $100
• NamePros Fixed Price Domain Sale
• DigitalPoint Domains for sale

What to Buy?

That will ultimately depend upon your purposes.  Higher search count .net and .org names can be good to build a site to rank it in Google and monetize. Lower search count .com names can be used to try to sell to end users, or simply resell on the forums or auctions. Buy when you have an idea what you plan to use the domain for: development, flipping, investment, addition to the portfolio, or anything else. And once you bought it make sure to bring those plans into action as soon as possible. Countless domains are being purchased just because it “looked like a good deal at that time” and when the time comes to renew them – they are dropped. So buy smart!

“Premium” is the Most Misused and Abused Word by Domainers. Seriously, why would you call your domains premium if you’re selling them for $20 each? How can you call JNVY.COM a premium LLLL.com and moreover a quad premium one?

The truth is it’s really one of those useless words to insert in sales threads. Calling a domain premium won’t convince anyone and if the domain truly is premium then there is no point in underlining that fact. Any prospective buyer would know that already.

Actually for many domainers this word likely became associated with the opposite meaning, seeing someone claiming to sell “premium” domains they intuitively expect garbage, and usually rightfully so.

The only real and beneficial use of the word in regards to domain sales is when it actually means something, for example to note that an LLLL.com domain is quad premium, or triple premium.

On a different note I’ve recently noticed that askimet marked some of the legitimate comments as spam, unfortunately due to the large amounts of I can’t go through them all, so if you had any of your comments unapproved that’s mostly the reason. If you made comments earlier on the blog and they weren’t approved post here so I can approve you and next time your comments will be posted automatically.

First it was NamePros down for 2 days, now it’s DNForum that is down. Hopefully this won’t last as long. I have a bunch of pms to reply to and several transactions to complete. What’s up with that?

Update: DNF is back up after a few hours of downtime, but working slowly for now and sending pms and making posts doesn’t seem to work.

Update2: DNF is down again!

Update3: DNF back up and running after 4-5 hours of downtime

This happened with me yesterday. One of the not so nice sides of domaining. In short: a member blue777 was asking for cvcv.com domains to buy and I pmed him a list of my names, including hace.com which is a great cvcv.com domain with many meanings and over 100 million results in google, asking him to make his best offer and if I like it I might accept, so he offered $3,000 for hace.com and I accepted it. But a few hours later he replied withdrawing his offer.

It’s not the first time it happened to me, domainers face this kind of thing frequently. Usually however from “end users” or other newbie domainers. In most cases it’s ignored, sometimes people would post/complain about it, or leave a negative itrader. But the fact that it was an established member who’s been around DNF for years and had many itraders, as well as the fact that he felt he could retract his offer (even after it was accepted) as easily as he could make one made me post about this.

Have you encountered this kind of behavior, what’s your opinion on the matter? What should we do in such cases?

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..

Bune.com is for sale at a low price of $2950

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bune

Bune is a Great Duke of Hell, mighty and strong, who has thirty legions of demons under his command. He changes the place of the dead and makes them demons that are under his power to gather together upon those sepulchres. Bune makes men eloquent and wise, and gives true answers to their demands and also richness. He speaks with a comely high voice.

Bune is depicted as a three-headed dragon, being his heads like those of a dog, a griffin, and a man (although according to some grimoires he has two heads like a dragon and the third like a man).

Read more here

While this is pretty cool stuff, frankly I don’t know many (any) people who would take it seriously (um.. no offense intended), but such names with powerful and mystical meaning make an excellent brand for a site, or company! read more »

$173,035.90 RPM – meaning $173K for 1000 visitors, how would you like that?

1 visitor and 173.04 USD , probably the highest “per click” you’ll see with any parking program. This interesting case was recently reported in dnforum by a fellow domainer.
Apperantly Domain Sponsor pay also for CPA – cost per action – which sometimes brings a healthy commission like that, usually with financial and insurance traffic. Sure beats the pennies sedo usually pays.

The highest I ever got per click was $13 in adsense. But it was only once.. also there were many $2-3 clicks.

What’s your highest per click?

Similar to Anything.com, Reinvent.com own a top generic portfolio:

Domain Names We have thousands of domain names, each representing virtual real estate that can be developed into premium online businesses. The powerful nature of targeted visitors and premium branding of generic keyword domains can give rise to a perfect storm of rapid brand recognition and visitors to an online presence. Below are a sampling of our virtual real estate portfolio that will be leveraged to branded businesses.

Reinvent was founded in 2000 by Dr. Kevin Ham.

The rapid expansion and unparalleled technologies of Reinvent – and Internet entrepreneur Kevin Ham himself, have not gone unnoticed. In 2007, Kevin was voted “Domainer of the Year” by his industry peers. He was also featured as the cover story in the June 2007 edition of Business 2.0 magazine. This year, Kevin was the recipient of the Industry Achievement Award at the DomainFest 2008 Conference, an annual gathering of the key players in the Internet industry space where Reinvent focus. read more »

Bune.com For Sale on dnforum and here

Fabulous.com
Expiration Date: 2010-12-28
Creation Date: 1998-12-28

- top cvcv.com, pronounceable and memorable
- Over 20 Million results in google,
- first and last name in various countries

sedo stats last 32 days:
bune.com 318 23 7.23% 0.11 € 8.25 € 2.62 €

taking offers on the dnf thread, or by email

Two top sales reported today on Dnforum

printer.com sells for $800,000

Today the Dutch webmag webwereld.nl published the sale of printer.com for $800,000.

(in Dutch) http://webwereld.nl/ref/rss/52452

Printer.com was purchased through Sedo by a Dutch startup that spent half of its funds on it. The company is not yet reveiling its exact plans with the domain name but the site will go live on September 2.

Bedandbath.com sold @ Sedo for $50,000!

“Bed and Bath” is a pretty common term, but really not worth nearly as much

Moniker also brokered the sale of Affiliate.com for $580k

In other exciting news .org registry crossed 7 million domains!

The summer break is over and sales are hitting up again?