Domain Magnate

Despite the recession in US economy and a certain amount of uncertainty in the domaining market July 08 have been pretty good for me. I had around $50k in sales, with over 2/3 of it being profit. While most sales were private and the buyers preferred to keep them confidential, couple of the top sales are through public auctions so I can mention them here:

Dickinson.com $12K on Bido
Krom.com $5,5k through AfterNic
Harlot.com $5145 on Bido (I owned 50% of this one)

I rarely disclose my earnings and report sales, however I feel this is needed to encourage others to see the hidden opportunities in domaining. What I like most about the industry are the large gaps. Appraisals always range widely and so do auctions and sales, it’s not unusual to see domains being resold for 2x and more shortly after. read more »

Since I’ve started developing my US city domains I’ve been positively surprised by the adsense clicks.

In general my average adsense clicks are between $0.20-0.30 through out my sites, but the US city names had many clicks in the $0.5-$1 range. The traffic is as targeted as you can get and it’s easy to understand why advertisers would be willing to spend more, but these are relatively small cities, so the number of advertisers is quite limited.

These clicks are definitely nothing compared to what one could earn by attracting direct advertisers. I just read on dnjournal that PalmSprings.com earns over a million dollars a year only from the homepage! This definitely shows the potential in geo domains and pretty clear plan: get a top city domain, make some site and make it rank well in google, find advertisers to purchase banners for some annual fee. read more »

DomainMagnate.com presents an interview with Daniel, or tetrapak on NamePros and DNForum. Daniel is 23 and a full time domainer/web developer

- How long have you been into domaining and how did you get into it?
The story how i got into the domain industry is a bit funny, at least i can laugh now.. 4 years ago i’ve been helping a guy developing his Dubai related business website, and he promised a lot of things, like to be partners and such. I already had a website under developement with the first domain registered by myself, since then it is my biggest website with over 100k uniques per month, but that is another story. So this guy obviously haven’t paid for my work, but he introduced me the so called domain parking.. He sent me over an XLS file with his earnings of the last month. I was simply amazed when i saw that such domains as *Company*Properties.com (TM name..) can earn $8,000 / month purely by registering it and changing the nameservers. So with his help i figured i would register similar domains, as his top 10 domains were all earning 1k$+ / month, i thought i have nothing to lose. First i registered Properties*Company*.com/.net/.org.. and quickly parked them. Now i was officially R I C H. Then came the surprise… Day 1, no earnings.. Day 3 no earnings.. Day 6 ONE unique visitor! Now, i contacted the guy about my “problem”, and i told him that i believe he has faked his stats.. He said his brother is the one dealing with the domains, so he has nothing to do with them, but he knows a way to get a 50k offer on a domain. Which was…: Sedo Featured Listing! Yes, you guess it right, i had another 40$ burned. No sale… Of course he was surprised, but he asked me a favor, to bid on his domain (regfee name..) on Tdnam for 8k, he said there would be people to overbid me anyway. Sure. This was the end and luckily i had no contact with him since then. The good thing is, i started to earn with Adsense, and everything i earned i have reinvested in domains that were suggested by the friendly guys at over Namepros. The first serious sale was of a regfee hyphenated name for 8k that i registered in my first year.

- How many domains do you own and what is your primary focus?
Xxx names, it changes every day. No dot mobis and no dot asias I mostly own .com’s, but i prefer any other tlds for developement. I had success with .info’s as well, they are my lovely cheap ones (except the renewals!). read more »