Domain Magnate

$173,035.90 RPM – meaning $173K for 1000 visitors, how would you like that?

1 visitor and 173.04 USD , probably the highest “per click” you’ll see with any parking program. This interesting case was recently reported in dnforum by a fellow domainer.
Apperantly Domain Sponsor pay also for CPA – cost per action – which sometimes brings a healthy commission like that, usually with financial and insurance traffic. Sure beats the pennies sedo usually pays.

The highest I ever got per click was $13 in adsense. But it was only once.. also there were many $2-3 clicks.

What’s your highest per click?

According to this thread on dnf and this one in idnforums there might have been a $xxx,xxx sale for an idn domain.

The domain was not publicly disclosed, however it is a Russian term. Alexa is 0, so there is probably not much traffic.

Other posts indicate that  there were other previous $xxx,xxx sales and the idn  market is simply not transparent enough, however several investors are spending big bucks on names they think will be much more in the years to come.

From idnforums:

I recently bought 1 idn for xxx,xxx
Some may say it is way over priced if you are comparing it to the current ‘market’ that is practically isn’t born yet but i prefer to pay more now then getting to the point where it just wont be for sale.

The $xxx,xxx sale has been confirmed as a Russian IDN , the $x,xxx,xxx “sale” still waiting for further info.
Also confirmed a Chinese seller sold a .cn for a good $xx,xxx to a business in China.

IDN domains are a highly controversial market. Many domainers believe it’s a waste of money while others predict it to take off big time. What’s your take on that?

How do I make money domaining?

Well by most part it comes to:

1. know the market well
2. buy low
3. sell high

Domaining is a strange market. There are the end user prices and the market/reseller prices for any domain – both can vary a lot and there is a lot of money to be made on these differences.

However the risks are high, so you have to know the market very well. Being able to appraise a domain as close as possible for any specific marketplace is among the most valuable skills for a domainer. read more »

Update: domain was sold

Civa.com

GODADDY.COM
Expiration Date: 2009-02-20
Creation Date: 1996-02-19

Made 4.53 € = $7.04 in 32 days on sedo. Average 34 visitors per day. Screenshot here
Rather high ctr, but very low clicks, so with some optimization and maybe at another parking service it can do much more.

Over 1,5 Million results in google and many potential end users. Many sites: civa.org, civa.org, civa.org.uk, civa.com.pe, covacom.com, civaglobal.com, civa.be, civatools.com – all are used for various businesses.
Also a last name, like veronicaciva.com.

All these are active sites and there are a lot more. This is a top 4 letter name with excellent opportunities and steady type in traffic, don’t miss out.

Should sell quick at this price. Also for sale on dnf
Post sold to claim, winner will be decided by timestamp.

payment within 2 days by paypal masspay, or escrow, buyer pays all fees

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 »

NyTimes has an interesting story on a guy who flipped a site for an awesome $173K, after buying it for $1800 and doing some changes. According to compete.com traffic estimates the site bird-cage.com only has 5-6k monthly visitors from US, so it’s strange that just 200 visits per day can provide such nice income. Besides the site only has 257 links in yahoo and doesn’t seem to have any decent google rankings for the top keywords.

So it really looks strange why would someone pay a healthy amount of money for a small site, without much traffic.

On the other hand it shows that development could bring nice profits and e-commerce sites are the money makers!

here is the article: 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 »

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

I’m finally getting more into developing my domains and at first I’m planning to build a few small adsense sites on the city names and generics.

Here is one I did this week BethelPark.com – Bethel Park is a city of 33.5k people in Pennsylvania.

This one is a small site with 10 content pages. I’m currently testing different templates to see what gives the best ctr, but I think this one should do good. The trick is to make ads blend in and fit the theme. read more »

Sedo is notorious for making sellers pick low reserves to “encourage more bidders” and while it sometimes work, frequently there aren’t enough bidders in the first place, so names end up with low prices. This mostly refers to GreatDomains auctions.

Next GreatDomains event has these names in the list, among others:

Attended.com no reserve
Calcium.net $1-$499
Debbie.net no reserve
Doctor.net $5,000-$9,999
Illicit.com $1,000-$4,999
Doorway.com $1,000-$4,999

Now some of these reserves are just ridiculously low, someone will get bargains!
I think low reserves only hurt the sale, there should be either no reserve at all, like on snapnames and bido, or a fair reserve like there is usually in TRAFFIC auctions and good sedo auctions. Low reserves will just reduce the domain’s value in the eyes of the buyer. A quick example is when I recently sold my coriander.com for just $5100 on greatdomains auction with reserve $5k, after it went up to $9k on a sedo auction previously, shy of reaching its reserve. There are simply not enough bidders to create a bidding war to get the price up, especially now due to summer, recession, election, global warming..