Domain Magnate

Update: March 5, 2009 - I have just use this codeto renew and bunch of domains and it still works. If .com is what you’re after you don’t need any other godaddy codes!

I was just renewing some domains at godaddy and as usually had to do a little research to find the best coupon codes. People like to post large lists of codes, where most are expired, or simply don’t work and you have to check each of them to see which saves you the most money. Especially now with the recession in full speed domainers try to save every penny on the costly renewals.

So to make it simple, I’ll just list one code I used:

yhkw105a  - dot com  renewals and new registrations at $6.99 (+ $0.20 ICANN fee) - the cheapest price currently available at godaddy.

In related news, Godaddy’s market share in domain registrations is 26.7%, compared to eNom’s 8.3%, Moniker 2.6% and Fabulous only 1.2%. A Godaddy monopoly, when it comes, will definitely not be a good thing for domainers here..

Another Moniker Auction just eneded:  Search Engine Strategies

Most SEO guys can easily pay thousands of $$ for links, but they aren’t willing to spend the money on domains. It’s a shame they still don’t get it: better domain will help the SEO campaign as well, in many ways.

Even though the domains weren’t high quality here, some clear bargains emerged, like  SeoProduct.com for  $300.00

The results aren’t very reassuring this time as well: read more »

Top sale in dnjournal’s report today:

$260,000 for TripleCreditReport.com

Looks quite overprices and suspicious indeed, and btw QuadrupleCreditReport.com is still available, should be worth at least 25% more

There are a few threads over at dnforum discussing this here and here

Some have suggested that similar sales might be fake. There can be many reasons to do this: someone trying to get attention to his domain and sell it for a good amount later, or for tax purposes, to get funding etc. There are many ways to fake a sale like that, so this is quite possible. read more »

Justin Godfrey, known as Rockefeller on dnf, recently posted about his sale of 92 LLL.com’s for $598K:

I just finished up a deal where I sold 92 LLL .coms for just about 600k, probably could’ve got more since it was only 6.5k each, but it’s nice to see people are spending freely again!

I suppose the LLL.com’s were of lower quality so this sounds like a good deal. It’s indeed good to see that there is healthy demand for the names in such quantities. The buyers are out there and ready to invest and spend money on quality domains! It’s the lower quality domains that are “in recession”, good generics and 2-3 letter .com’s are always in demand.

Myself I don’t own any LLL.com and never have. I always thought they were overpriced and not a good investment. They can’t be developed, they are too expensive for most end users and during the last half a year it’s unclear if the prices are going up or rather dropped.

So I’d much rather buy geo or generic domains.

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 »

This was posted at NamePros by betthelot:

If it helps, I can give you the other meanings of numbers in Chinese

Very useful if you are into numeric domains. Also explains why 4 is considered bad

1 single-mindedly, whole-heartedly, heart and soul

2 mandarin duck (it means that the good things appear in pairs)

3 promotion (especially in the officialdom)

4 death

5 me
read more »

Domain news reports:

As promised, we are keeping you up to date on this developing story…  As  we reported yesterday, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer had held firm with the original offer, insisting it was fair in light of Yahoo’s eroding profits during the past two years. He threatened an attempt to oust Yahoo’s board if the 10 directors, including Chief Executive Jerry Yang, didn’t accept the offer by April 26th.
Since Yahoo has forced the issue by letting the deadline pass, Ballmer appears ready to put more money on the table. Microsoft’s board reportedly met earlier this week to consider raising the bid as high as $33 per share. It wasn’t clear whether Microsoft presented that figure, which would translate to about $47.5 billion for the deal, to Yahoo Friday. read more »

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

If you, like over 95% of other domainers, want to develop some of your domains with minimal effort and expenses into a site that can bring revenue, here is one of the best and easiest methods: Set up a bidding directory.

What is a bidding directory?

It’s a regular web directory based on the auction system. Webmasters can submit their links and the links with highest bid will appear on the frontpage of the directory. For example here is one of mine: Casino Bidding Directory, as you may see the highest bid is $100, and the lowest bid on the main page is $60. So a bid of at least $61 is required to be listed on the front page. Minimum bid to submit a site to the directory is set to $9, and you can see that most bids listed in categories are about that amount, for example in advertising

The main advantage of a bidding directory is that its completely automated. read more »

ICQ.ca in now at auction in Pool.com with current high offer $2302 and over 3 days to go.

Now obviously this LLL.ca domain is only that valuable due to the popular IM program with the same name. So it’s very likely that icq.ca has some very good type in traffic that can let the owner make the money back in just a few months.

But the problem is ICQ is a trademark, which now belongs to AOL. Even if the domain icq.ca will be used for something unrelated to the icq brand AOL can claim it and most likely receive the domain. read more »