Domains

It looks like there could be a trend here — last last Thanksgiving the top domain sale was $52,000. Last week the DNJournal’s top reported sale was only $23,380. This stands in very sharp contrast with the previous week where Macau.com brought $550,000 along with five more domains bringing in six figures. I suspect this slow down had more to do with the recent TRAFFIC Silicon Valley conference than the recent holiday.

Here is a good piece of anecdotal evidence from DNJournal’s TRAFFIC Silicon Valley article.

Bhavanie noted the incredible value of leads that can be generated from a good generic domain. His brother is involved in manufacturing in Asia so Bhavanie gave him a related lead that came through his CellphoneAccessories.com site. His brother told him that one lead resulted in more than $2 million worth of business in the last 8 months. On a PPC page, the click might have generated 10 cents!

In a few days I’m going to make a big post of the real evidence why developed domains are better than parked ones.

I’ve been predicting a strong year for the domain market for the past few months. As you may or may not know, I dropped several thousand dollars on a single domain right before this past Christmas (and its coming along better than I even imagined.)

Thats not to say that thousands of domains out there are overpriced. There is no shortage of terrible deals out there which are best avoided.

That being said, the already hot domain market is only going to get hotter. TRAFFIC Silicon Valley wrapped up, and DNJournal has an inside look at what went on.

While Marchex was the first public company to make a large purchase in this space (the $164 million buy of the Name Development portfolio last year), Bayme said giant media companies like Time Warner, Fox and Viacom could eventually enter the space as the industry consolidation that is just now beginning plays out.

There will still be a few years left where average guys can pick up really good domain names. Those days are passing. If you see a sweet deal, don’t hesitate to grab it.

Here is how not to name your website — www.paydotcom.com

Good luck with word of mouth, how many people do you think will end up at pay.com instead? This company might think their name is “pay dot com” but their name is actually “pay dot com dot com.” Too bad, because it looks like they’ve got a pretty good idea.

I could be wrong here, and they might do great in the same way del.icio.us has. But that would certainly be an exception to the rules.

I’m assembling a list of known premium domain developers. This includes companies with premium domain name portfolios which may be 90-100% pay per click parking pages, but have at least declared intent to develop their portfolio. Here is the list I’ve assembled so far:

Future Media Architects
Chena Ventures Inc
Internet Real Estate Group
eCorp Inc
DigiMedia.com, LP

If you are aware of any other companies developing premium domain names which are not included in this list, please let me know!

Out of curiousity I put DNJournals list of reported domain name sales over $10,000 from 2005 in a spreadsheet. I found out that the total sale value of these 622 domain was $25,987,717.00. Of course, this is just reported sales and doesn’t include anything under $10,000. In reality I suspect its just a small snapshot of 2005’s actual domain market.

The top 5 reported sales for 2005, as shown in the above chart:
Fish.com, $1,020,000
Bills.com, $964,500
Earth.com, $800,000
Website.com, $750,000
Property.com, $750,000
Refinance.com, $706,850

the bottom 5:
CuteGreetings.com, $10,000
Choreography.com, $10,000
Cheap-Tickets.com, $10,000
CDZ.com, $10,000
Capes.com, $10,000
Billiger.com, $10,000

See any patterns?

Good article on the domain industry in 2006 over at DNJournal –

“Whereas the former may begin to fetch multiples of 20-30 years revenue or even higher” (refering to quality traffic domain names) “those holding domains less suitable as advertising platforms will see their sales values shrink to 2-3 years revenue, or less, as more and more domain professionals wake up to the reality that it’s time for the domain industry to focus on traffic quality.”

I’ve been skeptical about premium domain names for years. I’m going to keep this post short and simple. Here are two reasons your website (content or e-commerce) should be run from a premium, generic domain:

1. Guaranteed stream of visitors from type in traffic, which, I might add, are known to convert very well.
2. Guaranteed no one is going to forget your name — while its guaranteed people are forgetting your competition’s name. If you sell grills and you are grill.com, visitors are coming back (worth noting, grill.com is currently a parked domain right now.)

There are a lot of great success stories of non-keyword domains.. Yahoo, Google, Amazon, eBay.. but that doesn’t mean millions aren’t being made from generics. Think about it this way — everyone remembers their search engine that they visit daily, but how are they going to remember the name of an e-commerce site they shop from once a year — that doesn’t have a billion dollar marketing budget?

Your domain is your website’s foundation. If you don’t choose a generic domain, at least make sure its not easily forgettable.

As reported on DNJournal, MyBlog.com sold for $400,000, Sofa.com sold for $200,000 and spanish domain Viajando.com sold for $90,000. Oddities include VoodooDolls.com for $16,250 and BakingPan.com for $2,706.

According to DNJournal the top domain sale last week only brought in $52,000 in sharp contrast with fish.com’s $1,020,000 sale the week before. Other notable domain sales include Mypsace.com for $35,100.