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Does he ever get a good offer? It seems to be the case that all the biggest websites are not on "good names" but that they took meaningless words and make them

Does he ever get a good offer? It seems to be the case that all the biggest websites are not on "good names" but that they took meaningless words and make them good names.

CydeWeys 6y ago
hotels.com? uber.com? stamps.com? There's lots of really big businesses built around single word domains. Not every single one of them of course, but definitely enough for good domains to be immensely valuable.
- taftster 6y ago
  Yes, but did they sell for $1 million? Or did these "premium" domains sell for something more realistic?
  - H8crilA 6y ago
    An asking offer without a bid is just that - an offer. I can ask $1M for that red apple sitting on my desk. It's completely irrelevant. PS. This behavior is quite prominent in real estate prices, they're so slow to fall down. For example the US real estate market bottomed only in 2011. You have to be very patient if you want to buy the dip in such "I will only sell for the right price!!" markets.
    - CydeWeys 6y ago
      Real estate isn't a great example because the carrying costs of unsold property in the form of upkeep, property taxes, mortgage, insurance, etc., are non-trivial. In general it's not remotely reasonable to hold onto property for 20 years without selling it. By contrast, the holding cost on a domain name is effectively zero, so there's much less pressure to get rid of one quickly. Plus, seeing as how the prices have only continued climbing over time, people who held out earlier and then got a good deal more recently don't regret it. If I had a good portfolio of potential $1M+ domain names I too would hold onto them and wait for the right buyer to come along. I'm in no desperate need of money right now.
      - H8crilA 6y ago
        And yet people do it in real estate.
  - ShinTakuya 6y ago
    You'd be surprised. Not going to name anyone in particular but I know of multiple major one word domains that have been bought for that order of magnitude (some more, some less). For certain companies, that's chump change compared to the additional traffic a good domain name will bring their business.
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    They sold for quite a bit more than $1M, in fact. I would argue that the actual sales are realistic (in the sense that they reflect the actual price that people are willing to pay for them, i.e. their actual value), and it's merely your expectations that are unrealistic. You are significantly underestimating how valuable a good one-word keyword is in a single globally unified namespace used by billions of people daily. For companies worth many billions of dollars (most of the below), a few million on a killer domain name is nothing. Here are some notable expensive domain name sales: Uber.com 2% of the company's equity in 2010 (!!) Sex.com $13M Hotels.com $11M Tesla.com $11M Porn.com $9.5M Fb.com $8.5M https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_domain_names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_domain_...
    - dmix 6y ago
      Whoever owned Uber.com was a smart business person and/or a tough negotiator. That’s brilliant. Thanks for the examples. Note it also lists LasVegas.com for $90 million (in instalments) from 2005. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2018/08/07/exact-match-domains-how-to-price-these-high-value-assets/#156a9f337437 https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2018/08/07/ex...
zmix 6y ago
He says, that one of the domains he already sold, was "corp.com". A few comments above we can read, that it was up for auction, starting at 1.7million and Microsoft bought it in the last few weeks.

Does he ever get a good offer? It seems to be the case that all the biggest websites are not on "good names" but that they took meaningless words and make them good names.

CydeWeys 6y ago

hotels.com? uber.com? stamps.com? There's lots of really big businesses built around single word domains. Not every single one of them of course, but definitely enough for good domains to be immensely valuable.

taftster 6y ago
Yes, but did they sell for $1 million? Or did these "premium" domains sell for something more realistic?
- H8crilA 6y ago
  An asking offer without a bid is just that - an offer. I can ask $1M for that red apple sitting on my desk. It's completely irrelevant. PS. This behavior is quite prominent in real estate prices, they're so slow to fall down. For example the US real estate market bottomed only in 2011. You have to be very patient if you want to buy the dip in such "I will only sell for the right price!!" markets.
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    Real estate isn't a great example because the carrying costs of unsold property in the form of upkeep, property taxes, mortgage, insurance, etc., are non-trivial. In general it's not remotely reasonable to hold onto property for 20 years without selling it. By contrast, the holding cost on a domain name is effectively zero, so there's much less pressure to get rid of one quickly. Plus, seeing as how the prices have only continued climbing over time, people who held out earlier and then got a good deal more recently don't regret it. If I had a good portfolio of potential $1M+ domain names I too would hold onto them and wait for the right buyer to come along. I'm in no desperate need of money right now.
    - H8crilA 6y ago
      And yet people do it in real estate.
- ShinTakuya 6y ago
  You'd be surprised. Not going to name anyone in particular but I know of multiple major one word domains that have been bought for that order of magnitude (some more, some less). For certain companies, that's chump change compared to the additional traffic a good domain name will bring their business.
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  They sold for quite a bit more than $1M, in fact. I would argue that the actual sales are realistic (in the sense that they reflect the actual price that people are willing to pay for them, i.e. their actual value), and it's merely your expectations that are unrealistic. You are significantly underestimating how valuable a good one-word keyword is in a single globally unified namespace used by billions of people daily. For companies worth many billions of dollars (most of the below), a few million on a killer domain name is nothing. Here are some notable expensive domain name sales: Uber.com 2% of the company's equity in 2010 (!!) Sex.com $13M Hotels.com $11M Tesla.com $11M Porn.com $9.5M Fb.com $8.5M https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_domain_names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_domain_...
  - dmix 6y ago
    Whoever owned Uber.com was a smart business person and/or a tough negotiator. That’s brilliant. Thanks for the examples. Note it also lists LasVegas.com for $90 million (in instalments) from 2005. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2018/08/07/exact-match-domains-how-to-price-these-high-value-assets/#156a9f337437 https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2018/08/07/ex...

zmix 6y ago

He says, that one of the domains he already sold, was "corp.com". A few comments above we can read, that it was up for auction, starting at 1.7million and Microsoft bought it in the last few weeks.