Most people believe that you simply need a name and a bit of time to make money when investing in domain names.
This is usually not the best way to make money.
Domain Aftermarket & Sales
To sell or not to sell
When you receive an offer for one of your domains, you are likely to make a counter offer in order to get the best possible price. They will reply with another offer and so on.
The hard part is not to make the counter offer, but to decide when to stop talking.
Expand your portfolio
Sooner or later, you will have more than one domain name in your portfolio, especially if you plan to make a living out of it.
The question is to decide on how to expand it. There are several approaches:
How much would you pay to own Toys.com?
We all know that a domain name is only worth what a buyer is willing to pay for it, but what if they are willing to pay over $5 million?
Toys.com was sold through Bankruptcy Auction for $5.1 million dollars in March this year. This places Toys.com at the number one spot in dnjournal.com’s highest reported domain sales, so far, for 2009.
The toys store Toy ‘R’ Us purchased the domain name knowing that it had a constant flow of traffic, perfect for their brands. The domain now provides links to Toy ‘R’ Us brands: Babies ‘R’ Us, eToys.com, Baby Universe.com and Toy ‘R’ Us.
Sedo Reports Strong Q3 Domain Sales – 5.5% Increase
According to Sedo’s newly released Domain Market Study, Q3 domain sales increase 5.5% over Q2. Respectfully, Sedo represented 75% of the top 20 public domain …
SnapNames Employee was also bidding on many auctions!!!
Just received an email from SnapNames that they discovered an Employee under a fake alias was BETWEEN 2005 and 2007 bidding on many of the SnapNames domain drops and using internal system to see the max bids and win good domains, and also the same time also bidding up the prices.
I don’t know about you but we have always had that nagging feeling that our max bids always seems to just stop at the very top and this would explain some of these. There are a few user accounts that were active in 2005 and 2007 that I recall that won some great name… Anyone care to guess which user handle it was?
In compensation, SnapNames are offering credits or cash refunds to all accounts affected by this which shows great customer service. The full email is below.
How much is a domain worth ?
“How much is it worth ?” This is a recurrent question from people new to the domain aftermarket and the answer is not very straightforward.
There are some basic rules such as the shorter the better or a .com is worth more than a .net but to know how much you can get when selling a domain is very difficult.
3 Letter Domains
As a short name is worth a lot more than a longer one, it may be tempting to buy any very short name available.
However, this does not mean any short combination of letters is worth millions of dollars.
TRAFFIC New York 2009 Awards
The TRAFFIC Awards were present to the winners last night. Voting for the nominated parties started 2 months ago and as these are votes by domainers, well done to all that won the praise of their fellow domainers.
And the nominations and winners were…
Accentuated characters and much more
If you target markets where the native language is not English, you are likely to encounter letters which are not part of the standard Latin character set. It is immediately obvious for languages such as Japanese or Arabic but common as well in French, German, Swedish, etc…
You may be tempted to consider buying IDN (Internationalised Domain Names), which allow characters not part of the ASCII set.
