03.15.08
Posted in Domain Names at 8:06 pm by Athol
It amused me to read the recent Business Week article about YouTorrent, the new index site to give the video and music companies heartache. Can you imagine someone who is running such a popular site, as he hides from the law, actually ponied up $20,000 to buy the domain YouTorrent.com? When you are providing a free path to contraband, and not charging for it, wouldn’t any old name have worked? Why did he have to do guerilla marketing off YouTube and BitTorrent? With millions of hits a month, that he is self-funding with no revenue model in site, this especially doesn’t make sense.
But then again, neither does it make sense to me when every few months someone tries to buy the domain Roseann.com off me for under $500. My sister, Roseann, and I, once ran a business with this name. Plus there are a number of congresswoman with this name, and it is of course close to the name of comedienne Roseanne (Barr) who is always on some rerun TV channel somewhere. To make sure I wasn’t too biased, I had GoDaddy appraise the domain and they came back with a range of $6,822 to $17,000! Me, I’d be happy to get half the lower end of that range… but in the meantime it is worth more to our family.
Permalink
12.02.07
Posted in Domain Names at 12:16 pm by Athol
Recently I had a client who considered buying a domain name for some strange idea he had. As is often the case nowadays when you see it come up with a number of links only on the page, it was hosted at Sedo. The seller was quick to say it had been professionally appraised and that is why the price was $24,000. He also quickly snapped up all the .net, .org, etc. variations once he got this inquiry.
Well guess what? My client had it appraised by Sedo themselves and GoDaddy.com (probably the two biggest services in the business) and their average price was just under $2,000.
Yes, lots of domains are being bought and sold, but most for sale are worthless. The average sales price ends up being somewhere about $1,500. Sure there are still occasionally the jackpot names out there… but they are few and far between.. and have proven revenue capabilities or are really needed for a new brand name.
This latter case is very rare though when you consider that you can get a good professional naming agency to come up with a new name for a corporate account for less than $6,000. (Even much less for a small business or small proprietorship startup). And that price includes full legal registration, trademark checks and matching .com domain name!
Permalink
06.24.07
Posted in Domain Names at 7:03 am by Athol
Bob Parsons, the daddy of famous domain registrar GoDaddy.com writes in his June blog about his continual outrage
about all the people doing domain “kiting” and why that is making it so much harder for many people to get the domains they want. Since my business often depends on getting domains for clients (as a final step in naming a company), my first reaction was to fire up the friends and family and start a concerted attack on ICANN. But then I realized I might not want to disturb the hornets nest anymore.
Sure they claim 5 million plus names a month, but they return 4 million or so a few days later when they discover Google won’t feed them enough money making ads. But some of these guys are now super well-funded. If they couldn’t return the names, they might just hold them all… or at least a high percentage of them. That would be the real tragedy: Names held for a year by people who can’t make money off them, yet the common man (and agency) can’t easily acquire them either! It would probably cause a sickness much worse than a bad case of Googlitis.
Permalink
