Domain Magnate

Google recently added new case studies or “success stories” as they call them. These are mostly established sites that use adsense as either the main or the secondary source of revenue. They all look good, have nice and neat designs and lots of unique high quality content. Some are major news, entertainment  or informational portal, others are smaller niche sites.

The funny part is most success stories start with a tale of how someone decided to make a site to provide some useful information for students/patients/stock traders and one day decided to try adsense on it – put a small ad unit at the bottom of the pages and was forever surprised by the high earnings:

Furniture.ie was founded in 2003 by Richard Moyles to make the process of finding products for the home easier, with the goal of saving people time and money by allowing them to search many stores from a single location..

Finfacts.ie is a business and finance portal launched in 1997 with the aim of providing content related to business and personal finance to the Irish market..

Livecharts.co.uk is a stock market data portal covering global markets. The site started out as a hobby site in 2005 and – depending on market conditions – now gets up to 3 million page impressions per month..

Spartacus Educational started life in a small office at the home of its founder and director John Simkin in 1997. Simkin left a job as a textbook publisher to set up his own company, providing academic publications online.

I guess that is the image they want to present to the world (that is the regular people are not into online marketing) and not the one of a growing number of people researching keywords, buying targeted domains, cheap content and links and trying to maximize their adsense revenue by placing tons of ads everywhere. Adsense turned content into online commodity and made massive amounts of low quality free content available online and  profitable like never before. Not that I’d complain of course, on the contrary. However duplicity and hypocrisy rules as always.

ipo-installment4.com a domain registered only on Sept 24, 2010  – less than a week ago,  was reported sold on Sedo for $100k .. WTF?

There are discussions on this on DNF and NP. The domain is merely a week old. IPO.com was sold for $500K as observed on the recent dnjournal weekly sales report, so some suggested in might a mistake, being part of the ipo.com sales plan in installments.

However Estibot appraises it at $103k, so no worries, buyer got a good deal

I started two $60 no reserve auctions today on sedo for these two great 4 letter domains:

FOLE.com

AKEB.com

It’s been a while since I auctioned anything on Sedo, especially without a reserve, so it’s a bit of a gamble and I’m curious to see how they do.

Also I’m running  a Large top 4 letter domains sale going on on DNF, with domains like Pame.com Hace.com Bonu.com DDRR.com CEFO.com KWAP.com and more..

If you take a look at sedo auctions at any given time most of the auction listings only have one bid and the vast majority of them also end up with one single bid – the end user who made a bid and the seller decided to push it to auction.

When you push a domain with a high starting bid (high in relation to its reseller value) to auction one of the following is bound to happen, in this order of likelihood:

1. The domain will get no more bids and the initial bidder will win. However during the 7 days he had plenty of time to (a) find another domain; (b) reconsider his proposal and (c) also saw that no one else was interested in outbidding him – which only tells him that he is overpaying, and no one likes to pay more. The chances of the buyer not following through with the purchase are increasing significantly and we all know how high is the percentage of non paying buyers on Sedo.
2. The domain will receive one more bid from another interested buyer. Strangely enough many sedo auctions end with just two bids (not 3 or 4, but exactly 2) – with the first bidder not getting into a “bidding war”. However in that case the seller only gets an additional $50 for his domain – which usually is not worth the trouble of a 7 day auction.
3. The domain receives many additional bids and ends with a significantly higher price – this is very unlikely if the initial offer was higher than the market price already and is much more likely when the initial auction starting price (which also serves as the reserve in such auctions) is much lower than the market price.

Clearly the third case is the only one that justifies pushing a domain with a high initial offer to a sedo auction. However it’s only likely if there can be many potential end users for the domain, or if the initial price was low.

If the initial bid is higher than the market value don’t auction the domain, instead negotiate the max you can out the buyer and try to close the deal as quick as possible!

JobsOnline.info recently sold for $12k on sedo.

I could see the .com going for that amount, but .info?!

Congrats to the seller!

Other tops sales were OD.com for $220,000, Luxury.net $38,750

First time I’m seeing 3character.com guide lowering prices and not just lowering, but by over 20% in a month!

3-Letter .com – $6000 (- $1650 since July 1, 2008 report)

3 letter .net lost 3.6% according to the guide.

What’s gonna happen next with the LLL.com? Well no one knows for sure. From a discussion in DomainState:

• snoopy: Agree, personally I think we will see prices come back into the $3000-$4000 range on the low end.
• DomainDiscount: Recently sold a 3 letter .com in the mid Euro xx,xxx range. Was an enduser sale though.
• Globalise: Sold a pair of LLL.coms last week for $130k.
  Two weeks ago I bought an LLL.com with mediocre letters for $15k and sold it, two days later, to another domainer for $40k.
• doughmein: I think it signifies a market correction because these qualify as “token” domains that are being tossed around, and there’s no indication that the lesser quality ones will be in demand by end-users.

read more »

Villas.com Sold for 305k Euros on sedo, $480 USD in one the largest sales this year.

In other sales, yestarday’s 20K euro sale of gmx.ca was one of the highest for a Canadian domain. Gmx.com is a huge site with alexa 123, so they are most likely the buyers. More .ca sales:

Afternic:
adultdate.ca $1,000
airfaredeals.ca $500
teas.ca $650
naturalfoods.ca - $190.50

bad.ca is currently auctioned at sedo with $2,550 high bid

Few top .me auctions are ending soon: read more »

A few top sales recently:
Revolution.org Sells for $120,000 by Sedo in one of the top .org sales so far.
GoPlay.com – $26,300 On NameJet. Namejet is becoming the new snapnames! Generic .com names fetch top prices at NJ.
Contrary.com $10,363

MOOT.com for $45K on Sedo

SS.tv appears listed in sedo recent sales for $21500.

Reminds about the story with SS.com, which was previously reported to have been sold for a hefty amount, but the sale didn’t go through.

Either way it’s a pretty decent amount for a .tv domain.

There were also some nice hyphenated sales:

sugar-bear.com $788
ice-rink.com $840
organic-spices.com $825
venetian-blinds.com $900

Nice to see the industry leaders working together, TRAFFIC in NY will have domains from all the major players:

1. Moniker
2. Aftermarket.com / DomainTools
3. Rick Latona
4. Bido.com
5. Sedo