Domain Magnate

There are quite a few webmaster forums around now, but none really good to provide the members with quality content, active marketplace and large and friendly userbase. With the recent degradation of DigitalPoint and several other big forums in the industry there is a demand for quality forum centered around webmaster issues.

Now there is a new kid in the block aiming to fill the void: www.netbuilders.org - less than 2 weeks old the forum already has over 100 members and 1000+ threads, growing quick. Some of the top threads: 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 »

The most popular thread on dnforum currently is this one: Domainers are Losers

As usually the dumbest threads get the highest exposure, but naturally there are also a couple good points raised in the thread. The OP intended that most people joining the industry don’t succeed that well, and this is probably right, same way as in any other business. Many domainers mentioned their successes as well in the posts.

Some interesting posts worth mentioning: read more »

Hey all,

I sell domains through forums quite frequently and always try to improve my sales threads and techniques, so I thought I’d share a few tips here in hopes that it will be useful. This post will mostly contain general tips, for more specific advice watch for the next posts in the series.

Include your terms.

This is quite important to prevent any disputes, or misunderstandings. Also to protect yourself from scammers and save time. I usually include something like this at the beginning of my sales threads:

- All prices are temporary and sale may end without prior notice
- Payments by bank wire, escrow, paypal (masspay, or add 4%), moneybookers, e-gold - all fees paid by the buyer, payment must be processed within 2 days.
- Bulk discounts are possible only if you buy 3 or more domains domains, pm for details.
- Please use who.is/domain.com to check registrar and expiry dates where not listed. All names should have at least 2 months till expiration read more »

In shade of recent events on DNForum, where some stolen domains were sold and others offered for sales and brokered, be very careful when asked to broker domains.

If a newbie member on a domaining forum asks you to broker a premium domain, there is a high chance it’s a stolen domain, otherwise why wouldn’t he do it himself? read more »

domainnamewire reports

Yahoo will stop allowing arbitrage as of this Friday, will affect other major companies as well.

In a major move sure to have ramifications across the online advertising industry, Yahoo (YHOO) has told its advertising partners that it will no longer accept “arbitraged” traffic as of this Friday. Here’s a look at what this means for domainers and even the revenue of big online advertising companies.

That will be a hard blow to many “domainers” who only had a short term strategy of buy and selling clicks. Few months ago several threads poped up in DNF where people claimed to make over $1-2K/day on arbitrage and parked.com officially confirmed that they allow it. But now, as it was expected, the door has closed.

Last Premium LLLL.net’s were bought out on Feb,5 2007 - 3 days ago. Now you can already see threads on namepros selling these for $20-25 each and some are getting purchased. It’s pretty obvious that these will grow in price and based on past LLL.net growth and LLLL.com quick rise to power, I predict the premium LLLL.net’s to have a minimum price of $50-100 by the end of the year - not a bad return for those who bought them for $5 each. I bought 400 premium LLLL.net’s myself, could have bought many more, but I figured I’d better keep these and renew them next year if needed as I’m mostly concentrating on LLLL.com’s now.

That comes to show the enormous leverage of a buyout. LLLL.com domains that were available 4 months ago are now selling for $60-70 and will continue to grow at high rates while new players enter the market and boost the prices by buying the 4 letter names in large quantities. At some point, several months from now, the prices will stabilize and continue growing at more regular rates close, but still higher than the LLL.com’s do now. Although the biggest winners will be the ones who originally registered the domains and had enough patience for the prices to grow to turn their $7 registration fee domains into $100+ domains.

All the decent cvcv.net/vcvc.net seem to be taken as well and have certain reseller value. People are also buying all good LLLL.net’s now inspired by the LLLL.com’s, but I think many of them will be disappointed because there are about 220K LLLL.net’s remaining. And unless a name belongs to a special category which was already bought out, like premium LLLL.net’s, or cvcv.net etc, it won’t have reseller value.A domain that looks “cool” to one person can be total garbage for rest, that’s why the safe way is always to buy domains that are supposed to run out soon. It’ll take years till we see the last of LLLL.net’s purchased, my prediction is 5 years or more - so don’t get too excited about these. There are more profitable opportunities around the corner