Selling Domain Names is Back - The Future of Domaining Meets the Past

Selling domain names has always been around of course, just at varying degrees of price. After the dot com bust domains were generally accepted to be worthless, today not so much.

For the last few years domainers didn't pursue domain sales because PPC revenue was quite robust. In the last year as PPC and traffic stalled against a backdrop of changing ad platforms, smart pricing and discard rates; a funny thing happened...  people started selling names..  and for a lot of money. Then Fabulous came along with their DDN laying the track for a sales network which will change things for years to come. 

I see us gradually returning to the beginning when domainers made a significant tranche of their revenue selling their names.. doing that in tandem with PPC and traffic arbitrage until the next generation of higher revenue domain name related paid-search sorts itself out.

The industry rule of thumb with large domain name portfolios composed of generic long-tail keyword style names and search terms is: you can make one dollar in domain sales for every dollar you make in paid-search.  I have seen this characteristic across several large portfolios.  It's one of the reasons I'm so bullish on Marchex's break-up value. If you're not selling domain names that represents an untapped revenue stream. The problem of course is that you can't replace the good stuff quickly enough and you risk selling the odd name too cheap.

I think developments in the sales industry will help sort these problems out. If I look ahead 5 years I see a mix where half a large domain portfolio is held for a name-sales marketplace focused on the trading of names, the other half is structured like Netshops or a lead gen network, utilizing organic name type-in traffic to high quality domains, coupled with Geosign style arbitrage to bring extra traffic to those netshops style sites which teams of people work on building out.  Something like that anyway.. Perhaps there is another leg where semantic technology helps to enrich these sites with dynamic content which is friendly to the search-engines or with wikipedia style pages which serve to create user generated content.

Bottom line,  there are so many ways to peel this banana..  but the heart of what's inside is very tasty and good for you :) .. The more we come out with new ideas about the future, the more those ideas rhyme with the past.

Comments

[Daniel Rueda]

who has the most unique strategic generic portfolio ever created? I believe that there is one master set of strategic premium vertical location based web properties. properties that are like a family, all share the same last name,top level. this family will be so powerful when networked together the create a virtual network communications language that will be impossible to compete. like a family of craigslist location based vertical web destinations. Question again is who has the greatest domain portfolio ever created? the value of this strategic vertical search multichannel platform will be priceless. The keyphrase vertical location based power of this network can weaken the value of other portfolios that are not truly a master network. those portfolio platforms of domains that are mumbo jumbo domains that have no relation to each other, the ones that talk about thousands to hundreds of thousands of domains and will only show you 25-100. 8 years in this industry and I see no contenders to the MyLocator.com vertical location based multichannel platform. Once these premium family network of properties is properly positioned it will be forever hard to compete. For one you will need over a thousand properties that all share the last name and are strategic and vertical in nature. A lot of portfolios out there just very few strategic vertical master sets if any. Like jupiter research says niche market vertical location based generic direct navigation is the greatest untapped market in search for advertisers and marketers. Thank you Jupiter.

[Tad Crazy]

WOW Daniel

I wish I knew what you just said!

Cause it sounds interesting

[Robert]

I do not know enough about the domain business to judge Daniel's comments. And although his theory sounds powerful and interesting I keep coming back to my "search" background and question myself how would something like this may fit into a "universal search strategy".

What I do not know and would like to, is if domainers ever take into consideration traffic from search engines when thinking on verticals or vortals. Take this case, where just ONE site -say, localskincare.com or localdoctors.com- can serve results for the entire United States narrowed down to the zipcode by virtue of geo-ip software installed on a server where each single result will be "local". Furthermore, such site can extend its reach beyond borders and serve results in languages other than english becoming more "universal". WHat is best, all a user has to remember is "local" (localdaycare, local_myneeds). Engines will surely appreciate this type of strategy much more than 74,000 zip-coded websites. And referring to such site will be much easier and powerful than a networked platform (I am referring to backlinks, of course). Geo-ip software has improved to such degree that can easily serve results by city, region, town or zip and redirect to different languages and even suggest links like "find doctors within 50 miles radius". Because of this, I can only guess whether a vertical location based property may still have its vulnerable side or not... But only if search engine traffic comes into the equation, naturally.

[Empedocles]

Local this Local that, UK this UK that, British This British That, US this US That. ??? .com this !! .co.uk that !! then anything thing you want, It is the brand that we trust.

"search-engines or with wikipedia the Brandpages which serve to create user generated content" (Longmans Dictionary/ Oxford English, whatever), Your sooo right.

On another subject to keep the optimism going chum of mine in the UK has a boxing ring and wants to hire it out in the and on the off chance today I searched for the appropriate name and found that ringhire.com & ringhire.co.uk was free !! Done & dusted. Some good names still out to be found