Domain Magnate

Happy holidays everyone, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and Hag Hanukkah Sameah

May the next 2009 year be happier, more profitable and more adventurous for you!

I’m doing my “holiday shopping” and looking to purchase a few good generic domains by the end of the year. If you got some for sale that fit the criterion, let me know!

Lately posts on the blog have been rare and erratic, but I’m hoping to post more and better in the coming months. I’m also doing interviews with domainers of any caliber. Either if you consider yourself a professional, full time domainer, or
if you just started with domaining recently - other domainers would be very interested to hear your thoughts and experiences. To get your story told on this blog just email me to ‘contact at this domain’ expressing your desire to get interviewed and short details about yourself and I’ll reply back with a list of questions.

Follow DomainMagnate on Twitter to get constant updates.

iSearch.com was offered for sale several times before on ebay, but failed to reach near the reserve, the last ebay auction ended at $61000:

• iSearch.com Premium Domain
• iSearch.com

Now it finally sold for a nice $300K to Intelius [Nasdaq:INTL]

Arlo Gilbert, the previous owner, has the news on his blog read more »

DomainMagnate.com is now on facebook

If you are using facebook and like this blog - feel free to add the page to your favorites 

This is one of my little experiments to try to utilize facebook’s massive traffic. Social networking/bookmarking is next generation of SEO..

Update: I’ve installed a plugin to send notices about new posts to my twitter, so you can follow my profile to get the latest posts instantly!

I’ve been hearing about it a lot lately, so finally joined myself as well.

It seems pretty basic.. a little similar to my old site post simple, so I don’t get how it became so popular.

Looks like some people use it to send updates about new posts on a blog, which sounds like a good idea. I should find some wp plugin for that.

So anyone else using twitter, what do you think about it?

A few recent posts and discussions picked up this week that are worth to be mentioned here:

The True Value of Domains: Has Anyone Ever Lost Money on a Domain - an interesting discussion among industry leaders on thedoains blog about the risks involved with investing in top names.

This week’s sales report by DnJournal

Huge Premium LLLL.com sale by DomainMagnate - yeah that’s a shameless self promotion, but hey it’s my blog

Interesting Domaining Survey by domainnamewire

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.

This is the first of a series of interviews with different domainers intended to let everyone express their views, opinions and share their experience.

I think it will be interesting for most domainers to see how their fellows are doing. If you’d like to get interviewed feel free to contact. Domainers with all levels of experience will be given an equal chance here. read more »

In this new section I’m planning to post a series of interviews with other domainers.

Unlike other Interviewers I’m not going after the domaining celebrities, but rather much smaller scale domainers and domain professionals like the average readers of my blog in order to give everyone a fair chance to express their opinions and share their views on the industry.

You’ll get to see domaining through the eyes of various people with different domain portfolios and experiences, as well life backgrounds. An unbiased and straight forward approach to domaining by a wide range of domain investors from the newcomers to experienced professionals.

I received several inquires lately from people interested in being interviewed and
some interviews are being prepared now. If you are reading this and you are interested in getting interviewed feel free to contact me by pming on DNforum or Namepros (My username: Michael_Goldman), or by sending an email to ‘contact’ at this domain.

stay tuned for more updates and the interviews

Rick reported this recently on his blog:

It appears GoDaddy.com gives you the option to cancel a transfer, after you have done an account change and the new owner has accepted the domain. How ludicrous is this? I’ve just had it happen a second time. Someone sends you a name, so you send them the money. The next thing they know, they pull it back! All they have to do is go to their account, go to pending account changes, check the box and click cancel. They can do this after it is finished!

Now in both cases it worked out fine because they had pulled it back because of a misunderstanding and quickly did another account change. It still leaves a huge door open for fraud.

I’m sure other registrars would let you pull back a domain as well, after you’ve pushed it.

I suppose it’s been around for a while, but this is the first time I hear about that and this could be a serious problem. Another reason to avoid godaddy and to be extra cautious, especially when dealing with new people.

New LLLL.com Price Guide is Out on 4letternoob blog by Reece.

Quad premiums had the highest increase in prices, which was only expected as they are the most desirable of all 4 letters.

Triple premiums with Z and other letters seem to be the real bargain at these prices. They are not too ugly and can have decent end user potential. If I find any at $75 a piece I’d buy them all! If you can get your hands on some triple premiums with K for $120 that would be a major bargain too.

According to the guide minimum prices are up to about $55 for the worst “anti-premium” type of LLLL’s, which sounds fair. The regular U+X, or Z+U type of domains which are being sold a lot around these days are worth about $65-70. Like xpru.com, xptu.com, zlhu.com. That would be a good price for them as well.

Triple premiums with Y,V and J aren’t that desirable and it’s strange to see them priced higher than K triples. But the guide is based on the actual sales data.. you can’t argue with the market.

Please note that the guide only refers to letter quality and disregards the other important characteristics as letter patters: CVCV, VCVC, CVVC, VCCV; number of vowels, for example domains with 3 vowels are usually worth $150 and up for the worst letters and 4 vowels would make it to $250 and up.