I read today that YP.com was recently sold for $3,850,000 to YellowPages.com. I know 2 character domains are worth a lot but that’s a crazy amount.
In the UK yellowpages.co.uk redirects to Yell.com, which is how YellowPages has marketed itself online in the last few years. The USA Yellow Pages is hosted at yellowpages.com but now that they have YP.com, perhaps they will rebrand their site in the future.
Regardless of the size and wealth of a company, no one spashes out 4 million dollars on a domain unless they have something planned for it. It will be interesting to see what they do with it.
I got an email today from Domaining.com, the popular domain name news aggregator.
Hello Kevin Muldoon,
A quick note to tell you the Domaining.com membership is no longer free!
All has a end, it’s now time for us to charge an annual fee.
It will help us pay our bills but also secure our site where new exciting services for registered domainers should be available soon.
As a result free accounts have been closed today, you’ll no longer receive our newsletter.
You are invited to sign up again if you are serious about domaining.
Ah I forgot, don’t panic, we are only asking a $35 annual fee.
Best wishes for the new year,
Francois Carrillo
Domaining.com
It wasn’t a website I read regularly so this change doesn’t really concern me. However, I was very surprised to see them adapt this model. As Reece points out :
Reducing the advertising rates seems to be the best choice. Instead of $100/day to have a sponsored headline, cut it to $50/day. Instead of $1400/week for a banner ad, make it $500/week. The banner advertising prices ($1400/week) is simply too hgh — it wasn’t selling during the good times and we’re now in a recession, so it’ll have to be cut that much more…
I have to agree. A lot of Domainers do have more money than some webmasters out there but they aren’t stupid and $1,400 a week is crazy. If they weren’t selling ads at these prices they should have dropped them.
I wish them the best with their new model but I wouldn’t be surprised if they reverted to an ad based model in a few months time as $35 is pretty steep for information which can be found elsewhere on the web.
I was browsing the featured domain listings at Sedo today and I noticed quite a few celebrity domain names.
Names include :
- benaffleck.com
- mattdamon.com
- penelopecruz.com
Theres another day or so to go in the auctions so it will be interesting to see what they sell for.
I have always been wary of buying domains which could be snatched away from me but there seems to be a lot of domainers who are willing to take a risk and squat on popular names and trademarks. At the moment each domain has had around a dozen bids with the current price for each domain being $500+. Which isn’t too expensive if you get to keep the domain.
And perhaps you will. The description on Sedo for benaffleck.com says :
Domain receives 2000-4000 uniques/month
There have previously not been any legal issues with the domain.
Obviously the person selling the domain is going to say there hasn’t been any problems with it but the fact they are selling the names in the first place suggests that getting your domain name is not on the top of their agenda for many superstars.
However, Scarlett Johansson this week won ScarlettJohansson.com in a domain name arbitration case so this could be a sign of things to come.
Hope you’re all having a great Christmas. Just remember, when you’re all stuffing your face with Turkey, Santa is busy hijacking all of your premium domains. You have been warned!!!
I was really surprised to see that Digg.org was recently caught by Pool. Surely their admin team should be looking to renew this domain extension, even if it only generates a little traffic every month.
I’m sure Digg.org will go for a pretty penny when it is put up for backorder. A lot of domainers are warning against bidding for it as Digg could take the buyer to court and just take the domain back from them, but will they? Digg.net has been registered by someone else for ages and Digg haven’t tried to get the domain from them and Digg.info leads you to the network site of David Russell.
So perhaps it is worth bidding for Digg but I’d personally be reluctant to spend a lot on it incase it is just snatched away from me.
In the last few weeks I have added quite a few 3 and 4 letter domains to my domain portfolio, all of which I backordered via Pool. My portfolio was really slim so it was important for me to try and get some good domains registered and try and ease myself back into the domaining game.
Here are the names I acquired :
3 Letter Domain Names
- kdr.info
- mhc.info
- nqr.info
- qrz.info
- vxz.info
4 Letter Domain Names
- bimu.info
- bisu.net
- duti.net
- duwi.net
- fres.net
- frlo.org
- goki.info
- mipu.org
- mixa.org
- ogoc.net
- pevo.info
- pobb.org
- rula.info
- stir.info
- thix.org
- wune.net
I have parked them all at Sedo because if you sell a domain through one of their auctions the minimum fee is $50 however if you park your domain there for more than 30 days you just pay the standard 10% fee. All of these domains cost $60 each to backorder so it was important to reduce selling costs so that I make a profit through them.
Parking all of your domains at the one place is also a great way to compare their traffic. At the moment Mipu.org is getting 4-5 times as much traffic as the other domains (which surprised me).
In my opinion the best 3 letter domains I got are mhc.info and kdr.info and the best 4 letter domains are mixa.org and stir.info. Mixa would be a great name for a music site and stir would be a good brandable name for a cooking information/recipe website.
Some of the domains are acronyms whilst others are simply good CVCV domains which would be good for branding (CVCV = Consonant Vowel Consonant Vowel). For example FRLO stands for Free Rate Loan Option and BISU stands for Beijing International Studies University (amongst other things). These domains might be harder to sell so I am looking to develop them a little.
Therefore I have tried out DNForum’s PPC Tempplate Service. Prices start at $49.95 for one website but they get cheaper the more you order. I decided to pay $149.95 for 5 websites which brings the price down to $30 a website.
The websites they produce are basic and the content is not great but the search engines will spider them. And as long as I make more than $30 per website with this venture it will prove worthwhile. At the very least it’s much easier to sell a domain which has traffic and is making money and you have to give things like this a shot sometimes, particularly if you don’t have time to develop them yourself. I’ll let you know when they have completed my websites to show you the quality of them.
Future Additions
I do think that this a good time to buy however I’m going to wait til I sell a few of these domains before I start purchasing more. After the domains have been at Sedo for 30 days I can list them in an auction. 3 letter infos have been going for between $100-$150 on average so I should make a little from those. I might have to hold onto the 4 letter domains a bit longer to make some money but that’s something I’m willing to do.
Have any of you picked up some good domains or had any good domain sales recently?
I read a few days ago that Scotland may be getting it’s own tld. The extension would be called .scot or .sco. The first minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond, was recently in the Catalonian region of Spain, which got it’s own .cat domain extension 2 years ago, and was impressed to see that it has has since seen over 30,000 registrations.
I was surprised to see this announcement since the uk already has a .co.uk extension however I for one welcome it. I’m not sure if they would restrict registrations to Scottish individuals and companies but domainers usually find a way around that kind of thing anyways.
If the bid for the domain with ICANN next year is successful then perhaps we will see an application for a regional domain name from Northern Ireland, Wales and England too. Companies which do business all over the UK would still prefer the .co.uk extension though I’m sure companies who’s business is more local would be interested in it.
Last week Google announced that they are extending adSense for domains to all publishers. Normally new advertising options are welcomed by the webmaster community but domainers have been less than pleased with Google moving into this market.
Many domainers believe that this is bad for the domain industry and will be the first step in Google getting a stranglehold in the industry.
DNKitchen
I will be the first to go on record and say that this time next year parking companies will be obsolete. Does this mean run and move all of your domain names to Google, absolutely not. Just like anything new it has to be tested and tweaked several times before its right.
As of now you will still gain more traffic and money by parking companies. With a parking company you have more control over the keywords used, optimization, visual appearance and content.
Many believe that this within a few years Google will have complete control over the parked market. Biggedon, a moderator over at DNForum, said
Don’t be so quick to thank google. On the surface, it seems great for domainers but once everyone is on the googlewagon, then that’s when they will have complete control. As by then, they will have eliminated the middlemen between us and them and many domainers will be dependent on G.
Once that happens, they will start to implement new policies and standards. Some or most you may not like it in the end, they are definetly looking for ways to monopolize internet traffic
At the moment this option is only available to USA based domainers but when they roll out in the UK I’m going to try it. Until then, I am going to reserve judgement. Though I understand why many are concerned about google moving into the domain parking sector.
I have never let a domain expire that I didn’t want to keep however it has happened to a few friends. Particularly when I have registered a domain for them and pushed it to an account and told them how to renew it every year. They inevitably forget about renewing it and then email me about why their website has stopped working.
Small businesses who are not familar with the internet and have no technical employee are also prone to letting their company domain expire. I’ve helped a few companies who registered a domain via my domain reseller website only to let it expire a year later and then panic when they realise they can’t access their email!
The danger with letting a domain expire is that someone else will register it. If you just used the domain so that you had your own personal email address then it may not be reregistered however any website with traffic and/or a pagerank will be snapped up quickly by domainers via backorder.
I read about such an incident today. The Domainer reported that the owners of GeorgeWBushLibrary.com let their domain expire recently. A company in Raleigh NC, Illuminati Karate registered the domain for $10 after it expired and has since sold the domain back to the original owners for a whopping $35,000!!!
So remember, always set the domains you want to keep to auto renew so that your web properties don’t slip through the net
Link : This is Why People Squat On Domains: GeorgeWBushLibrary.com Sold Back For $35K
There have been a lot of domain name thefts in the last year or so. I spoke about 2 of them recently on Blogging Tips in my post How secure is your domain name?.
The best way to reduce the chances of your domain being stolen is to be proactive and make it more difficult for hijackers to steal your property. And domainer Reece Berg has created a blog to help you all do just that. The blog is called Domain Name Scams. If you are looking to find out more about how you can protect your domain name and how you can buy and sell domain names safely, I recommend checking it out.
Link : Domain Name Scams
