Domain Owl

The 2011 Domain Fest event garnered a small bouquet of winners. Moniker (formerly Snapnames) has posted the results. For Fijiislands.com, a $58,830.00 sticker price is fairy impressive, the standout sale of the auction. Longish name propertyappraisal.com fetched $23,530.00. An organic name, the totally potentially awesome organictea.com earned $17,650.00, a big hint to all those name searchers looking for “organic” revenue.

I’d like to see typo traffic for brassieres.com, which sold for $3,112.00. A more abstruse name, dialectic.com, earned $2,500. The multiuse product name generic, cables.info, did pretty well for a /info name, nabbing $1,315. An unusual entry shows that country code names are dead with the right shorty domain, to wit, staff.me got bid for $1,250.

The conventional wisdom about only short names selling coms under fire after news of th this next sale. The Long long domain name wirelesssecuritycamera.com got $830, this could be huge because the market for this generic product has highly specialized tiers of price ranges. Wirelesssecuritycamera.com is a long domain name but can be promoted and marketed with keywords or used as a forward.

Product based domain names can be Amazon stores or review sites, or with a little imagination real communities for product interface comparison and upgrade sourcing. Every try finding an upgrade or patch for your product Wouldn’t it be nice if you could Google your unit and get the patch or upgrade link or file at one website?

Net hitter cyberbargains.com earned, $750, a good hint to scout out cyber- starting names or cerate one for revenue or marketing. That is a real nice price for such a generic and promotable name. You can practically hear the Facebook calling. The winter product based domain name newskis.com schussed outta the rack for $675.

These name sales should illumine the sales process and value generation plan for domainers looking to leverage online web site publishing tools and resources for value creation in domain name investment.

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There is a unique opportunity taking place now, and savvy entrepreneurs can act to secure real profits and increase over value. The herd in the domain world can tend to run in the same direction, but some key value elements might make a big difference when scanning droplists or making offers on auctioned names. The actual name and keyword combination is still important, but attaining a key name in the “other” realm of TLD’s is obviously newly profitable.

If the auction sales from DomainFest show one thing, it’s that no assumption about a TLD being valueless in the future is accurate. Dot Me names (from the CCTLD for Montenegro) and the newly minted .CO landslide (from the CCTLD of Columbia) may be hidden investment gems. The UDRP landscape is filling up with trademarks, and the domain holder who brands their own CCTLD along with a possible primary dot com dot net or dot org, can win the domainers stakes.

The census years ago was that (whether domainers will admit it or not) .US was really just an also-ran in the domain space. Many domainers who had invested were tearing their hair out over so much “wasted” investment. They must have read the Domainfest report with sackcloth and ashes.
Here are some name sales. Trafficjam.com sold for $11,500. Kiss.me sold for $10,000. Love.me sold for $32,000. Won.com was the big winner with a $115,000 payday, a great sale for a three letter dot com. The very timely name BridgeLoan.com sold for $27,500. Damages.com went for $25,000. LoanQuotes.com sold for $75,000. Those are some healthy name sales.

Dot US names had a premier place in domainer’s hearts, simply because a huge tranche of domainers actually live and work in the United States, thus using the country code TLD in a manner according to the reasons it was formed. The CCTLD names in the past were bought in a flurry of gold rush activity. But if the five figure domain sales reported from last week tell domainers anything, it’s that this week’s unwanted TLD name is going to be valued much higher in few years, perhaps even months. Time to get cracking picking up those “dollar” domains.

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I have come to use a new system of measurement with my domainer peers and colleagues, one that reflects their concrete commitment to developing their domains versus the merely stated intent or practice of doing so. So many domain buyers pose as active promoters it is easy to see how some domain name buyers can get lost trying to figure the players without a scorecard.

I never judge another domainer based on whether they use the same tools as I do or whether they favor the same site estimators.  No two domainers are going to use the same system, even if they have the same vendor accounts and use the same site analytics. Based on how these tools have served each domainer in the past, they will come to their own conclusion about the relative worth of each.

It’s a habit for domain name buyers and sellers to hype their latest online app or website find to each other. It’s part of the game. But sometimes I don’t really have time to expend double digit hours per month (or week) evaluating new interfaces or plugging into new websites that claim heightened value for website marketing. You can take the opinion of a domaining peer, or you ca try it out for yourself.

It’s completely possible that a “power domainer” within your acquaintance may favor you with emails concerning the latest fad website or the newest website or domain evaluator which generates the most pleasing estimation responses. it’s wise to be wary of following any one domainers and their practices and viewpoints too closely. It is entirely possible they may be affiliated with the new site or service, or derive a signup credit or kickback.

By the same measure, qualified recommendations by senior experts in the domain world can save you time and put you on a footing with the best in the business.  Checking out their communications keeps you in the loop regarding where the domain herd is moving and how fast it is going. And signing up for a new service can keep you abreast with first hand opinion regarding the efficiency of a website and how prurient their abilities are.

I had one such recent experience lately. One of my clients wanted me to make some blog posts (blurbs) on a service called BuildMyRank.com. Before this gig I had never heard of BuildMyRank.com. This program had some kind of promotional public relations slash distribution channel for brief informational posts about the clients’ relative keywords. The individual client would input the blurb and link them with interconnected anchor links at the target site.

One of the requirements of this site is that your site be “developed”. It’s not clear from the BuildMyRank prose if this means a minisite will qualify, if a parking page disqualifies the url, or of forwarding does the trick. I know I was irritated with how long the BuildMyRank.com signup process took, and the installation of the original url had unrelated interface problems that reflected a beta launch software edition.But nobody wants to walk away from a free (or paid but worthwhile) SEO advancement instrument.

I had used proformatted links inside BuildMyRank.com with my client and so duly posted a website and put up content. (At this time I had no intention of publishing a review) When I resubmitted the information for the newly developed site, many of the key links did not align and the interface keep issuing error messages not in concordance with the posted content. The keywords fit into the linking convention but the “save” operation would plug the links into the software. So I emailed customer support about the problem.

Well, you learn a lot about a website (and their “SEO” services) by the customer service response. My frustration was met with bitchy and argumentative responses again and again. The operator from BuildMyRank.com never addressed the specific bugs. They assured me that “thousands of users worked just fine” and immediately decided to close my account rather than deal with the issue.

Not only had my first attempt to use this Buildmyrank.com service broken down, but my account had significant bugs. Email to BuildMyRank.com did not yield working fruit. The difference between my client and me getting anywhere was that his BuildMyRank.com items were from a paid account service, and I was still in “free trial” mode.Would the eventual SEO value diminish or disappear under similar circumstances? If it indeed ever appeared?

The emails from BuildMyRank.com are snotty and stupid. This told me a lot about how they approached getting things done. Knowing this so far in advance was a relief. I hadn’t recommended this site to anyone yet. They would never know how many referral clients they lost, domainers with huge portfolios looking for SEO results and only the assurance of a trained site operator to work with.

I don’t know the net benefit of is service to my client, but I do not recommend BuildMyRank.com. The argumentative and offensive stack of response emails form their “administrators” reveals a bunch of coffee drinking teenagers pretending to run a business. Risking your url’s white SEO hat on this company is a risk. If you get difference experience at BuildMyRank.com you have my heartfelt congratulations.

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In working inside the domain world, people become independent business men (and women) without even knowing it. Internet individuals of every age and rank, teenagers, men and women acquire domain names and offer them for sale constantly, yet they seem to maintain a sort of naivete about the fact that what they are really doing is functioning as their own carnival barker-cum-insurance- salesman. This carries risks which the domainer (possibly unknowingly) is assuming.

Brokering your own domain name sale can have its challenges.  Escrow services have popped up online and established a benchmark many domainer trusts. These domain name escrow service companies work to form a break against the tide of aggression happening with entrepreneurs trying to vend their names to people who may not even speak their language but understand the value of the domain on offer or up for auction.

In observing a heated discussion today between two bidding domainers in a private auction, I realized the lava was being generated by the fact that the seller’s decision to vend the name had not been covered by a reliable domain name broker service. Somewhere in the bid process, confusion had arisen as to how the domain sale would actually be executed. Suddenly, the history of each bid and the goodwill of both bidders was attached to a wild insistence to doing things “their way”.

This angst could have been avoided by stating as Terms of Sale a named broker service acting as name agent. Otherwise, the tension of a bid/offer scenario is reduced to a clammy sandwich of broken promises, dying away email communications, and eroding forum threads, which might have formed the basis of a profitable domain sale. The world is full of domainers who have been caught up in the bonfire of anxiety, exhilaration, excitement and pure greed a bidding frenzy whips up.

Both bidders wanted to use their own version of a buyer’s contract, which of course didn’t meet with the approval of the seller. The actual excitement of the name and who would win it was mired down in discussions of “Tastes Great/ Less Filling” variety vis a vis online business contracts. The seller was suddenly caught in the crossfire of dissenting opinions due to his own lack of foresight in covering his bases.

How did the sale pan out? It didn’t.

As the discussion wound down so did the eagerness of both domainers to get the name. The seller had lost a good opportunity and squandered the good faith of both customers. The deer in the headlights was the seller, whose paying customers had moved on to greener pastures. The domain name was the unfortunate roadkill meeting its ugly demise by the side of information superhighway.

All this pain and suffering could have been avoided if the seller had just involved a listing and brokering service that would have wrapped up every question in  neat set of FAQs. When domains are at issue, good faith and the Internet part company when dollars cross the international dateline. Always cover your bets where a domain registration or name sale is concerned. Always respect the rights of the other (domaining) party in the the transaction. Translated: Nobody “has” to do anything.

Ethical domainers do business this way. (Hint: Don’t look to PayPal to police your four-figure domain sales. ) The benefit of a growing “rap sheet” of successful domain sales at any escrow service is the enlistment of those same escrow services on your behalf in times of trouble. Your good behavior will serve you in good stead when some upstart tries to steal your domain or hijack your site. “Free rent” is a negligible concept where hosting and bandwidth costs are concerned.

Yes, escrow services charge a fee. But so do most non-banking institution ATMs and that hasn’t stopped people from using them. A slice of the action is a small price to pay for delivery of the big bid. If you’ve got online real estate, trust the professionals to turn over the big amounts and rest easy that all is copacetic. Escrow services for domain names transfer the worry of a big dollar domain sale to the heavy hitters who pave the way for a legitimate and legal domain name sale payday.

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The criteria for assessing a domain name for purchase, resale, or development are fairly open to all.  The keyword value forms one value. Monetary resale is always a goal. Various sites online work to produce an estimation value, although few can claim to be conclusive. Auction sales for domains work well specifically for this reason. Domains can go to the highest bidder according to independent valuation.

While one community of domain name buyers and sellers may quote assorted values from estimation sites, those members are never committed to accept those values as indicative of any redeemable or legal citation. The general value of a domain name still remains the value for which it can, and is sold. Other domain values are as spurious as yesterday’s news.

Some domainers prize traffic statistics, and some domainers work from the original sale price.  Domain ratings systems can indicate the value of a domain, but cannot guarantee it will bring that price under the domain auction gavel. But an important component of many a domain names’ assessment is how the buyer or developer uses those metrics to go forward.

Typing a name into a category does not institute monetary value. Many keyword generics lie fallow in domain portfolios worldwide. The rationale for these to not be developed is that no development could renew the value the domainer has already invested and still reap the profit they have planned. These domainers are waiting for big-ticket auctions to vend their names.

Other names are still in the transitory period between acquisition and decision making. Maybe the domainer hasn’t had time to investigate the best of of “x” domain yet.  Or perhaps they are waiting for a spike in related content or keywords to vend the name in a private sale or escrow process. Parking is a time consuming challenge to manage and keep up to date with. And the lack of development attached to a parked name always make me leery of its traffic.

A topical forum post caught my attention debating this topic. Yahoo has a domain rating system which declaims a domain as:  Banned, Trademark,
Quality Control, Controversial, and Restricted are terms no domainer wants to see associated with their names. These names generally will little to no sale value. But one domainer’s name value authority can be another’s temporizing engine.

Where do the evaluation and assessment sites stand? Yahoo has a cloud over it (not a good one), and many domainers deride Alexa while still avidly utilizing it to assess their domain positoning ion te name marketplace. Valuate.com has many fans, and many banner ads. Estibot has some faithful fans, and assessment tools at Sedo, Pool, and Google Adsense can offer some additional metrics.

Since domainers are always looking to revalue and affirm their portfolio total, a trustworthy domain ratings site or evaluation destination tool is mush desired. A domainer cannot guarantee the originating site or evaluation engine for a domain name will still be in operation or still have the same integrity when the resale or auction decision is made.

Domainers need to avoid becoming emotional about their domain purchase choices. The most unsexy of domains can be the hardest workers, reaping affiliate revenues and growing traffic metrics while the big players spend a fortune promoting their varsity level urls. The traffic statistics going forward are what matter, and the business development the current domainer invests in the domain name is what cultivates domain value.

Domain names can be valued at one time ans the equally creditable estimation of that same domain name can be evaluated at another time and the value can be very different but extremely accurate. A domainer assumes risk when a big dollar domain purchase occurs and the lifetime of that value is not the same as the lifetime of the domain ownership. The joy of domaining is leveraged on what values the owner can bring to the name, and any other strategy sounds a lot like sour grapes.

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The market for domain name resales generally lies within the groups of domainers who are looking for a certain keyword or keyword combination for their domain, investors looking for a startup brand or a domainer  solidifying his position in a certain keyword, subject area or term domain name group in the portfolio. These domainers make better customers because they do not need to be educated so much as to the value of a potential name.

The domain sales approach needs qualified data. The domainer customer for a domain name resale will ask tougher questions and demand relevant statistics for page rank claims and boasted-about traffic volumes. This means demonstrated metrics and dated reports should evolve over time of ownership of the domain.The values of the traffic and page ranking should be common denominators across the board, not a flash in the pan from only one.

Page ranking from the buyer’s preferred source of information, and domain name value analysis from the buyer’s chosen instrument of domain valuation will rule the sale. Domain name brokers and domain estimation tools are meant to support discussion and negotiation, but none of them are final verdicts on site value.

Domainers should maintain records of status checks at each page ranking site over time. These tables can be valuable when demonstrating domain name value. Domain name page rank changes over time. Even content and subject matter from Internet users can change with no webmaster control. If a change occurs in the maximum page ranking or SEO results, they can point to historical periods of record traffic volume and SEO popularity.

Domainers will look up and evaluate the time the current owner has had the domain registered to them and evaluate the domain name potential in part with respect to what the current owner has done with it. It is likely that traffic and clickthrough patterns were more robust in the past than currently, Domain name buyers will want to know why. Referrer traffic may be made available to the prospective buyer as the seller sees fit.

One of the most current value-adds to a domain sale is the site database. For a blog site or a open source application, a domain name that comes with a database can be valuable indeed. Although some domainers do vend their legacy databases after domain sale elsewhere, the best putative use would be to naturally support the domain name organically and linguistically associated with its seo-coordinated and name-associated database table.

If the website database is packaged with the domain sale, a cash value should be attributed to it in addition to the metrics governing the domain name valuation.The new buyer of any domain cannot assume all material published in association of that url or site name belongs to the new owners. Explicit terms in the domain sale contract must be negotiated for this. If the database table and its contents are to be rendered in a certain form.

One good way to protect the free use of a database without the domain owner knowing about it is to age the HTTP written expiration date of cache files so the past users can’t pull down from memory legacy content. If the site owner or webmaster decided a body of content (by category, for example) needs to be archived and removed from public server view, they can reserve this content for future resale without it necessarily being attached to the domain name.

Adding original images to a blog or application article site engine can also increase the value of the database. If the database is paired or packaged with the domain name, explicit inclusion of the photography, any video or sound media, and graphics files must be stipulated in writing. Words and objects to support a domain name’s value, gathered over the course of domain development efforts over time , can be an important negotiating factor and value addition to any domain name sale.

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For every blog entry you can write urging newbs and experiences seasoned domainers to scan for every opportunity, the real news never fails to astonish. Even one domain nugget of gold mined from the mountains of domains pitched through the auctions can still make domainers goggle.

Domainers this week were goggling at a reg fee domain purchase of a top tld. To pay D.Tv and P.Tv for only $22 at reg fee is almost unheard of for a virgin domain land grab. Even more puzzling is the practice of registrars withholding premium short and one or two letter domains. These would repay the  registration expenses and  raise the most money, repaying the funding of any new venture. So holding back domains of premium value makes no sense.

So the big mystery of the day is how did these 2 letter .TV domains wind up getting registered for less than $22 each? Domainers are wary of this news because in the list of premium .TV domains released by Enom last night these were not available. Dot TV names are growing because everybody all over the planet has a TV or watches one.

The income model for domains of this caliber and brevity usually happen by auction sales to the highest bidder. Yet the buyers were originating from China, a nation whose government is making news for limiting and restricting its citizens from owning domains and starting online businesses. This domain could easily resell for multiple of $100,000. Some might say it should have the first time out.  So how did this happen?

Domainers are watching both the China market for domains and every new piece of global top level domain real estate possible. The Single Character Domain market is considered one of the most premium and hard to get domain name items in the world. The price should range in the five to six figures easily, especially for a tld like “TV”.

Bur fairness and market pricing is hard to control when the real estate originates in a place like China (or Russia). Liberation of such restricted domains for such a low price in such a limited quantity either signals corruption in the portal security handling, or a vulnerability in the purchasing mechanism.

It also may be the case that Chinese law and Internet enforcement may have “approved” the purchase of these domains.  If the process in China to approve Internet ventures spurs the domain purchase, then domains purchased under this program may officially list at low prices. But there may be hidden red tape costs.

Domainers are keeping a close watch. The first China domains land grab is being controlled by government forces in China, and any opportunity to leverage a vulnerability will be exploited by domain name owners and buyers worldwide.

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There are domain sales and there are domain sales. Some of them make sense and some of them come under the “who knows” category. A million dollar domain sale gives a domainer bragging rights for some time to come. They become the envy of almost every domain reseller and webmaster they know. When certain niche names come up for sale, the market tide can turn either way.

The sale of xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.xxx troubles me. I don’t know what the actual term in the domain name is, but we can assume it refers to something best not shared when Grandma is in the room. Usually domainers get on the bandwagon with every big sale, but this one I am not so sure about for a multiple of reasons. I’m not sure how this domain can be monetized to reflect that investment.

For one thing, as a typeable domain name it’s simply too long. Any name that long (not to mention the user base) will likely not type it in. Furthermore, most filters to public and corporate networks, as well as some internet providers, might flag an account for whatever practice this term refers to. Many computers have automatic screening that flags parental controls when something like “bleep.x x x” crosses its neural network.

A lot of internet traffic happens from people at work. People at libraries, people at schools.  A destination url of this type would shut down the browser and flag an administrator. This discounts the destination site as being a work application or a site that can be safely visited from work. So, what type of entertainment or adult site can recoup almost $3 million of investment?

Would you trust a site with this type of name? Remember,  we now live in an age where you are what you download. This is exactly the type of site with material in its load pages, links or within the site map to trigger all sorts of computing problems.

The domain suffix alone triggers an antivirus or scanning response from most browsers or piracy programs. The triple x notation is a universally known symbol for pornography and as a global TLD will always be limited by what browsers and internet traffic will accept these sites. Searching a computer for any document or handler for “xxx” of any continuation is a common network administration tool for security software.

The impact of pornography and adult sites, BDSM and other online sex cultures have been mushrooming since the internet began. The adult name market and domain names routing traffic to mature audience material will always be a part of the Internet. But I can’t help but be leery of someone (or anyone) ponying up $2.7 million to exploit it. That’s a lot of pressure, as I see it, to do the wrong thing.

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