The Nameify Blog

“The peak has passed’, they say.

The days when Sex.com sold for $12 million (2005) are gone, never to return.

Perhaps so. Perhaps the huge money is gone.

On the other hand, it could be that the market is just finding its level. The days of huge ticket domain name sales weren’t that long ago: last year at this time, Creditcheck.com sold for $3 million and Seniors.com for $1.8 million.

But even then, the average domain name was selling for $2,000 - $3,000.

It was only the rare big-ticket name that made the news.

The market hasn’t changed that much. Hot names are still selling for large dollars.

A Look at .asia

Consider the recent opening of the top-level domain names for .asia.

DotAsia.org, the organization that has oversight for registration, reports that over 400 applicants competed for Buy.asia. The second most popular was Sex.asia (is anyone surprised?). Their current auctions show a $20,000 price tag on ace.asia and a $10,000 bid price for mediaworld.asia.

Now that the .asia domain is open for live registration (first come, first served) you can bet that hot domain names are being snatched up wholesale.

All this shows the domain name market is still as hot as it ever was. This is partly due to a reported 30% a year increase in online ad spending.

More Than Just Selling a Name

While new “domainers” focus on name auctions only, the secondary market in domain names is booming, largely unobserved. With domain name parking, site development, and ad revenue, domain name owners aren’t sitting still.

They are making money beyond the initial cost of their ‘property’.

I am sure you have heard domains called “virtual real estate”. It’s really the best analogy. You can buy a piece of property– some land as yet unclaimed– and do nothing with it except offer it for sale as is, or (and this is what the savvy buyers are doing) you can spend a little time and money to improve your land and raise its value.

With domain names, you do this by parking it on a server somewhere (usually as cheaply as possible) as the first step.

‘Parking’ just means instead of holding the name simply as a registered name on paper, you attach it to a URL somewhere. You can tell the difference by clicking www.macrosoft.com and www.marplots.com. (I suspect Billy Gates owns the Macrosoft one, but I don’t know.)

The first will give you a ‘page not found’ error (someone owns the name according to whois.org, but the name isn’t currently linked to any URL). The second will bring up a site that is parked. It exists, there just isn’t any content.

“Property Improvement”

One way to improve a domain name you want to sell is to increase the hit count so you can demonstrate to a potential buyer that the name ‘has legs’.

There are two stats of interest.

1. The first is hit counts that don’t come through a search engine– as when people just type a URL into their browser. If I were interested in cars, I might just take a shot at cars.com and see what comes up.

2. The second is ranking on Google or other search engines. Either because the top-level domain name is a good keyword, or because you added some content to the site to improve SEO.

In both cases, the value of the parked domain rises because of the number of hits. When it is offered for sale, buyers can be assured that the name comes with a good hit count and search engine ranking going in. And just like real estate, improving your property means a higher selling price in the end.

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