6 ms·

Domain name valuations

29 points by hanifvirani 16y ago

erikstarck 16y ago
The fact that business.com cost $345,000,000 makes me weep. I mean, look at it! I guess the old real estate saying is true: "location, location, location"...
- MatthewPhillips 16y ago
  I'm still waiting for domain valuations to eventually plummet, as it just doesn't seem that people navigate to sites that way. The only thing that it provides is lower barriers to come back for a second visit.
  - brfox 16y ago
    I used to be more likely to click a link on Google if the domain name looked more authoritative. So, a lot of those common names with high prices would seem to be valuable for that reason. And, I think Google ranks sites higher if the domain name has the keyword in it. These days with so much spam, I try to avoid domain names with my search keyword in them.
    - haploid 16y ago
      "And, I think Google ranks sites higher if the domain name has the keyword in it." There is some effect, but it's not that significant. Bing, on the other hand, seems to weight domain names very highly.
  - haploid 16y ago
    "it just doesn't seem that people navigate to sites that way" It may not "seem" that way, but our data suggests strongly otherwise.
  - vaksel 16y ago
    won't happen why? Simple..exact match bonus. An exact match domain has a much MUCH easier time getting to the #1 spot in search results. This is why creditcards.com outranks all of the big banks.
- ohashi 16y ago
  Wasn't a domain only sale. The domain alone sold for 7.5 million.
spxdcz 16y ago
One of the valuable ones that I can spot is daz.com, "Daz" being a popular Procter & Gamble brand of soap powder (at least, in the UK): http://www.dazwhite.co.uk/ http://www.dazwhite.co.uk/ - I'd guess they'd quite like the .com for their brand.
- asb 16y ago
  If anything I'd think the existence of Daz as an existing brand devalues it. Daz is a nice, pronouncable three letter domain but if someone were to buy it with the aim of developing it they may be put off by the prospect of P&G lawyers trying to strong-arm them into handing the domain over.
- staunch 16y ago
  FYI Even entertaining an offer from P&G could open him up to the possibility of losing the domain under ICANN's rules.
  - tristanperry 16y ago
    It depends when the Daz trademark was registered. The domain was regged in 1998, and if the TM was registered after this date then it should be okay. There are pushes by some US law makers (e.g. the silly Senator Olivia Snow) to change this so that TM holders have much more rights over domains, even if the domain existed before the TM, but for now it should be fine. Would be worth consulting a domain lawyer if an offer is made for it though.
    - metageek 16y ago
      That's Olympia Snowe.
    - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
      Daz, as held by P&G, was filed for in 1941 in UK, class 3 - http://www.ipo.gov.uk/domestic?domesticnum=614056 http://www.ipo.gov.uk/domestic?domesticnum=614056. A company called Mills Brothers BV hold an internationally registered mark "Daz" in classes 18, 25 too. I'm sure there are several others.
romaniv 16y ago
I see these prices as a clear sign that the current DNS system needs to be replaced. It's ridiculous. They are driven up by "scarcity," but there isn't any real deficit. Names are just letters and numbers, and there is infinite number of combinations, there is virrually infinite number of relatively short combinations. The biggest problem, as I see it, is that there are only a few TLDs, none of them are very meaningful, so it all effectively converges into a single namespace. If there were TLDs like .games, .mag (magazine), .press, .news, .comp and so on, no single domain would hold so much "value". For companies, you could have a reserved .corp TLD where every entry has to be verified (so only a registered business with matching name can own it). For products, you could have .prod.
- rll 16y ago
  It seems to me that the problem is more squatters like this guy.
- ohashi 16y ago
  They are working on that and I think it's a terrible solution. Here is why: consumer's want life to be easier. Remembering the name of every company and then adding .com is hard enough. Now I have to remember companyname.companyextension? There have been plenty of TLDs launched which all just failed. .biz anyone? .info? The scarcity isn't artificial, it's the limited amount of recall a consumer has for information.
  - kscaldef 16y ago
    There's certainly artificial scarcity caused by people buying up domains and then sitting on them and doing nothing. I have a side project I've been working on where I'm blocked in deploying it because I haven't been able to find a good domain name that isn't taken. Now, none of the domains I've thought of are actually being used, but they've mostly been registered for ~10 years by people who apparently have no intention of actually developing them. In a couple cases, they are listed as for-sale, but people are asking tens of thousands of dollars, which I simply can't afford for a side-project in a very niche market.
evanjacobs 16y ago
One other data point for you. Groupon.com was purchased in May 2009 for $250,000. Source: http://mixergy.com/domain-business-tip/ http://mixergy.com/domain-business-tip/
Alex3917 16y ago
How much of each domain is worth depends on how it's being sold. For example, I was asking a domainer how much my domain eskimokissing.com would be worth the other day, and this is what he told me: If it expires and drops, 300 - 600 dollars. In a wholesale liquidation of an entire portfolio: 800 - 1200 dollars. On it's own, with a list of 50 potential companies that you're willing to cold call, and you've put in the work to find the right person within each company: 6,000 - 20,000 dollars. The above scenario, but if there is a bidding war between two or more companies: 15,000 - 40,000 dollars. So the answer is basically it depends how much work you are willing to put in to sell them. With some of these domains it's clear that you can put together a list of 100 leads if you're willing to put in 10+ hours per domain, but with others I would guess that you would probably have to liquidate them at bargain basement prices to get any money back.
- ohashi 16y ago
  I think you have liquidation and expiring wrong. Expired domains generally command higher prices than you can get on the aftermarket from resellers. Why? I am not really sure, but I would hypothesize that the demand is most highly concentrated at the major drop sites. They also facilitate transactions more smoothly and uniformly. Big players don't have to muddle around with lots of individuals, they deal with one company who takes giant checks from them and are assured the domain and no drama every time.
  - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
    >Expired domains generally command higher prices than you can get on the aftermarket from resellers. Don't expired domains lose big time SEO by getting classed as "new" in SE algorithms though, I thought that was why they lost value. This assumes you've got something on there that's keyword relevant already I think.
    - ohashi 16y ago
      I suspect the majority of the buyers aren't looking at the SEO value. Also, most of the better names go through pre-release instead of actually dropping these days. As far as the penalties, I don't know for sure how and which names are affected.
lowprofile 16y ago
It seems that the jury is still out on domain name value in this new age of panda-monium. If I had a trendy green biz the greenbits one would be nice. ww.com is the aesthetic winner though.
joeuser12 16y ago
Liquidating domain names? I'm really surprised that the comments here are so supportive of domain name squatting. This is a sleezy business done by sleezy people. Even worse than the SEO garbage we see. If you are not using a domain, give it up and let someone who is able to do something interesting with it use it. Unfortunately that's not how the Web is anymore. It used to be. I really wish you had to provide a reason for wanting a domain name and then there would be some sort of yearly review to make sure you actually did what you said you were going to do with the domain.
dotpavan 16y ago
I am surprised to see ww.com in the list there. Unless I missed something in the recent past, wasnt it the webcam based venture he was working on?
- warp 16y ago
  They are not for sale, from the article: "Ww.com and reocities.com are there for 'curiosity value' only."
qeorge 16y ago
daz.com and ww.com are valuable (~$100k-250k), the rest he'd be better off keeping. secondhandcar.com could be valuable to the right person. You could probably get $50k from the right buyer. The rest are nice, but not "must haves". Unless a domain is rare and generic its not worth > $10k. Color.com, Mint.com, Tires.com are rare and generic, most of these are not.
tristanperry 16y ago
Speaking as someone with a fair bit of domaining experience, unfortunately a lot of the domains listed are worthless, with the exception of daz.com which is a 5 figure domain, ww.com which is a 5 (possibly 6?) figure domain, secondhandcar.com which IMO is a 4 figure domain, webcamsoftware.com which is 4 figures, and a few others which hold a <$100 value. So there are some valuable domains, but the majority are worth $0 in my opinion. (Note: I don't mean to sound insulting when I say they're worthless - indeed, I literally mean it that their valuation is $0). It's also worth noting that the domain industry got hit a fair bit by the recession, and it's possible that some of the above domains would sell for slightly higher than the rough range I've given (espeically the two 4 figure domains I quote, which could go for low 5 figures in the right circumstances). It's quite common to see people (as the blog post says) regging domains on a whim since they look good, but usually such domains regged on a whim are worthless. And unfortunately it does seem to be the case here. Anywhoo, I'll send my semi-informed appraisals along to the blog author now. I've been a domainer since I was 16/17 (am 20; 21 next month), so whilst I'm not an expert or anything, I have a fair bit of domaining experience and hope my appraisals are somewhat useful. And I'd possibly advise that he looks at DNForum.com and NamePros.com (the two big domaining forums; the former is paid-only though) a little bit to get a general feel of domain prices.
- sebseb 16y ago
  I have a few domains I would like to sell. Would you give me a quick valuation range like you just did with those?
  - jtheory 16y ago
    ...I thought of posting a few I was curious about as well, but that would get silly pretty quickly. Just about everyone here probably has 5-10 domain names (if not more) that they've registered somewhere along the way with a side project in mind that hasn't materialized yet. I personally am wondering if anyone knows of a way to put a domain name in escrow -- I had an offer for one of my domains from someone with a side project, and tried to work out a solution where he could have it for free, but if his project hadn't gotten any traction after a few years, it would revert back to me (since maybe I'd have found time for my own project by then...). No dice, though; he didn't know/trust me, the legal aspects were too confusing, and so on.
antidaily 16y ago
I'll give you an unopened copy of NHL 94 for Sega Genesis for ww.com.
portman 16y ago
PSA: the "historical domain sales" are wildly inaccurate. I suspect there was a bug in the script/procedure he used to scrape, because they don't match up to the sources below. Edit: here's a decent list http://www.webcooltips.com/the-most-expensive-domains-sales-ever-big-list.html http://www.webcooltips.com/the-most-expensive-domains-sales-...
sherazmahmood 16y ago
Could you get similar types of valuations for non .com domains? For example .me?
clistctrl 16y ago
Just throwing it out there, if any of you are looking to get into the gay business I'm the owner of MeatGalore.com and it is looking for a good home. :( it was the bastard child of to much beer.
pier0 16y ago
Domains are worth whatever a buyer is willing to pay, not what people in this thread or automatic tools on the internet believe/suggest. I've had domains that I hand-registered in the last two years sell for 4-5 figures and other that according to experts/tools are very valuable, but that simply do not attract any buyer. And I'm not even a regular domain investor (or domain squatter as people on YC seem to believe all domain investors = squatters). Anyway, I think the blog poster has a pretty good idea of what his domains are worth, but he's just trying to raise attention and possibly start a bidding war on the 2-3 interesting ones. Some choose to do their auctions through auction houses, other uses more creative forms.
mortenjorck 16y ago
Can anyone recommend a good domain name marketplace or auctioneer that doesn't have some kind of volume requirement? I merely want to unload a single domain name that I think stands a chance to chip in on my DSLR habit.
ranit 16y ago
Are you doing "silent auction" on us, trying to figure the value by the Law of large numbers?

29 points by hanifvirani 16y ago

The fact that business.com cost $345,000,000 makes me weep. I mean, look at it! I guess the old real estate saying is true: "location, location, location"...

MatthewPhillips 16y ago
I'm still waiting for domain valuations to eventually plummet, as it just doesn't seem that people navigate to sites that way. The only thing that it provides is lower barriers to come back for a second visit.
- brfox 16y ago
  I used to be more likely to click a link on Google if the domain name looked more authoritative. So, a lot of those common names with high prices would seem to be valuable for that reason. And, I think Google ranks sites higher if the domain name has the keyword in it. These days with so much spam, I try to avoid domain names with my search keyword in them.
  - haploid 16y ago
    "And, I think Google ranks sites higher if the domain name has the keyword in it." There is some effect, but it's not that significant. Bing, on the other hand, seems to weight domain names very highly.
- haploid 16y ago
  "it just doesn't seem that people navigate to sites that way" It may not "seem" that way, but our data suggests strongly otherwise.
- vaksel 16y ago
  won't happen why? Simple..exact match bonus. An exact match domain has a much MUCH easier time getting to the #1 spot in search results. This is why creditcards.com outranks all of the big banks.
ohashi 16y ago
Wasn't a domain only sale. The domain alone sold for 7.5 million.

spxdcz 16y ago

One of the valuable ones that I can spot is daz.com, "Daz" being a popular Procter & Gamble brand of soap powder (at least, in the UK): http://www.dazwhite.co.uk/ http://www.dazwhite.co.uk/ - I'd guess they'd quite like the .com for their brand.

asb 16y ago
If anything I'd think the existence of Daz as an existing brand devalues it. Daz is a nice, pronouncable three letter domain but if someone were to buy it with the aim of developing it they may be put off by the prospect of P&G lawyers trying to strong-arm them into handing the domain over.
staunch 16y ago
FYI Even entertaining an offer from P&G could open him up to the possibility of losing the domain under ICANN's rules.
- tristanperry 16y ago
  It depends when the Daz trademark was registered. The domain was regged in 1998, and if the TM was registered after this date then it should be okay. There are pushes by some US law makers (e.g. the silly Senator Olivia Snow) to change this so that TM holders have much more rights over domains, even if the domain existed before the TM, but for now it should be fine. Would be worth consulting a domain lawyer if an offer is made for it though.
  - metageek 16y ago
    That's Olympia Snowe.
  - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
    Daz, as held by P&G, was filed for in 1941 in UK, class 3 - http://www.ipo.gov.uk/domestic?domesticnum=614056 http://www.ipo.gov.uk/domestic?domesticnum=614056. A company called Mills Brothers BV hold an internationally registered mark "Daz" in classes 18, 25 too. I'm sure there are several others.

romaniv 16y ago

I see these prices as a clear sign that the current DNS system needs to be replaced. It's ridiculous. They are driven up by "scarcity," but there isn't any real deficit. Names are just letters and numbers, and there is infinite number of combinations, there is virrually infinite number of relatively short combinations. The biggest problem, as I see it, is that there are only a few TLDs, none of them are very meaningful, so it all effectively converges into a single namespace. If there were TLDs like .games, .mag (magazine), .press, .news, .comp and so on, no single domain would hold so much "value". For companies, you could have a reserved .corp TLD where every entry has to be verified (so only a registered business with matching name can own it). For products, you could have .prod.

rll 16y ago
It seems to me that the problem is more squatters like this guy.
ohashi 16y ago
They are working on that and I think it's a terrible solution. Here is why: consumer's want life to be easier. Remembering the name of every company and then adding .com is hard enough. Now I have to remember companyname.companyextension? There have been plenty of TLDs launched which all just failed. .biz anyone? .info? The scarcity isn't artificial, it's the limited amount of recall a consumer has for information.
- kscaldef 16y ago
  There's certainly artificial scarcity caused by people buying up domains and then sitting on them and doing nothing. I have a side project I've been working on where I'm blocked in deploying it because I haven't been able to find a good domain name that isn't taken. Now, none of the domains I've thought of are actually being used, but they've mostly been registered for ~10 years by people who apparently have no intention of actually developing them. In a couple cases, they are listed as for-sale, but people are asking tens of thousands of dollars, which I simply can't afford for a side-project in a very niche market.

evanjacobs 16y ago

One other data point for you. Groupon.com was purchased in May 2009 for $250,000. Source: http://mixergy.com/domain-business-tip/ http://mixergy.com/domain-business-tip/

Alex3917 16y ago

How much of each domain is worth depends on how it's being sold. For example, I was asking a domainer how much my domain eskimokissing.com would be worth the other day, and this is what he told me: If it expires and drops, 300 - 600 dollars. In a wholesale liquidation of an entire portfolio: 800 - 1200 dollars. On it's own, with a list of 50 potential companies that you're willing to cold call, and you've put in the work to find the right person within each company: 6,000 - 20,000 dollars. The above scenario, but if there is a bidding war between two or more companies: 15,000 - 40,000 dollars. So the answer is basically it depends how much work you are willing to put in to sell them. With some of these domains it's clear that you can put together a list of 100 leads if you're willing to put in 10+ hours per domain, but with others I would guess that you would probably have to liquidate them at bargain basement prices to get any money back.

ohashi 16y ago
I think you have liquidation and expiring wrong. Expired domains generally command higher prices than you can get on the aftermarket from resellers. Why? I am not really sure, but I would hypothesize that the demand is most highly concentrated at the major drop sites. They also facilitate transactions more smoothly and uniformly. Big players don't have to muddle around with lots of individuals, they deal with one company who takes giant checks from them and are assured the domain and no drama every time.
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  >Expired domains generally command higher prices than you can get on the aftermarket from resellers. Don't expired domains lose big time SEO by getting classed as "new" in SE algorithms though, I thought that was why they lost value. This assumes you've got something on there that's keyword relevant already I think.
  - ohashi 16y ago
    I suspect the majority of the buyers aren't looking at the SEO value. Also, most of the better names go through pre-release instead of actually dropping these days. As far as the penalties, I don't know for sure how and which names are affected.

lowprofile 16y ago

It seems that the jury is still out on domain name value in this new age of panda-monium. If I had a trendy green biz the greenbits one would be nice. ww.com is the aesthetic winner though.

joeuser12 16y ago

Liquidating domain names? I'm really surprised that the comments here are so supportive of domain name squatting. This is a sleezy business done by sleezy people. Even worse than the SEO garbage we see. If you are not using a domain, give it up and let someone who is able to do something interesting with it use it. Unfortunately that's not how the Web is anymore. It used to be. I really wish you had to provide a reason for wanting a domain name and then there would be some sort of yearly review to make sure you actually did what you said you were going to do with the domain.

dotpavan 16y ago

I am surprised to see ww.com in the list there. Unless I missed something in the recent past, wasnt it the webcam based venture he was working on?

warp 16y ago
They are not for sale, from the article: "Ww.com and reocities.com are there for 'curiosity value' only."

qeorge 16y ago

daz.com and ww.com are valuable (~$100k-250k), the rest he'd be better off keeping. secondhandcar.com could be valuable to the right person. You could probably get $50k from the right buyer. The rest are nice, but not "must haves". Unless a domain is rare and generic its not worth > $10k. Color.com, Mint.com, Tires.com are rare and generic, most of these are not.

tristanperry 16y ago

Speaking as someone with a fair bit of domaining experience, unfortunately a lot of the domains listed are worthless, with the exception of daz.com which is a 5 figure domain, ww.com which is a 5 (possibly 6?) figure domain, secondhandcar.com which IMO is a 4 figure domain, webcamsoftware.com which is 4 figures, and a few others which hold a <$100 value. So there are some valuable domains, but the majority are worth $0 in my opinion. (Note: I don't mean to sound insulting when I say they're worthless - indeed, I literally mean it that their valuation is $0). It's also worth noting that the domain industry got hit a fair bit by the recession, and it's possible that some of the above domains would sell for slightly higher than the rough range I've given (espeically the two 4 figure domains I quote, which could go for low 5 figures in the right circumstances). It's quite common to see people (as the blog post says) regging domains on a whim since they look good, but usually such domains regged on a whim are worthless. And unfortunately it does seem to be the case here. Anywhoo, I'll send my semi-informed appraisals along to the blog author now. I've been a domainer since I was 16/17 (am 20; 21 next month), so whilst I'm not an expert or anything, I have a fair bit of domaining experience and hope my appraisals are somewhat useful. And I'd possibly advise that he looks at DNForum.com and NamePros.com (the two big domaining forums; the former is paid-only though) a little bit to get a general feel of domain prices.

sebseb 16y ago
I have a few domains I would like to sell. Would you give me a quick valuation range like you just did with those?
- jtheory 16y ago
  ...I thought of posting a few I was curious about as well, but that would get silly pretty quickly. Just about everyone here probably has 5-10 domain names (if not more) that they've registered somewhere along the way with a side project in mind that hasn't materialized yet. I personally am wondering if anyone knows of a way to put a domain name in escrow -- I had an offer for one of my domains from someone with a side project, and tried to work out a solution where he could have it for free, but if his project hadn't gotten any traction after a few years, it would revert back to me (since maybe I'd have found time for my own project by then...). No dice, though; he didn't know/trust me, the legal aspects were too confusing, and so on.

antidaily 16y ago

I'll give you an unopened copy of NHL 94 for Sega Genesis for ww.com.

portman 16y ago

PSA: the "historical domain sales" are wildly inaccurate. I suspect there was a bug in the script/procedure he used to scrape, because they don't match up to the sources below. Edit: here's a decent list http://www.webcooltips.com/the-most-expensive-domains-sales-ever-big-list.html http://www.webcooltips.com/the-most-expensive-domains-sales-...

sherazmahmood 16y ago

Could you get similar types of valuations for non .com domains? For example .me?

clistctrl 16y ago

Just throwing it out there, if any of you are looking to get into the gay business I'm the owner of MeatGalore.com and it is looking for a good home. :( it was the bastard child of to much beer.

pier0 16y ago

Domains are worth whatever a buyer is willing to pay, not what people in this thread or automatic tools on the internet believe/suggest. I've had domains that I hand-registered in the last two years sell for 4-5 figures and other that according to experts/tools are very valuable, but that simply do not attract any buyer. And I'm not even a regular domain investor (or domain squatter as people on YC seem to believe all domain investors = squatters). Anyway, I think the blog poster has a pretty good idea of what his domains are worth, but he's just trying to raise attention and possibly start a bidding war on the 2-3 interesting ones. Some choose to do their auctions through auction houses, other uses more creative forms.

mortenjorck 16y ago

Can anyone recommend a good domain name marketplace or auctioneer that doesn't have some kind of volume requirement? I merely want to unload a single domain name that I think stands a chance to chip in on my DSLR habit.

ranit 16y ago

Are you doing "silent auction" on us, trying to figure the value by the Law of large numbers?