time to raise the asking price of your domains

[italiandragon]

Domains are worth what someone is prepared to pay for... so I don´t think there is a limit.

sure but we can`t take as "market price" the extreme top of a crazy sale.

Like in the real estate, there are medium averages that show market prices, then of course if you find R.Murdoch interested in buying THAT real estate, the price is out of the market price because THAT property is unique.

But we need to be realistic: can we see SEX.com sold for $100 millions in 10 years?
Can we see casino.com sold for $50 millions?
Can we see abcd.com for 1 Billion?

There will be a limit like in the stock market.

[Chelsea]

While I undestand your point of view, it is absolutely useless to talk about a price limit as a limit is always a personal and financial decission.
How much is a name worth to me? Can I afford to pay the price?

The consequences for sellers with such hilarious prices are probably only that they eventually will drop the names without making any decent business.

[WorldRadio.mobi]

I know its not really an accurate indicator, but if you look at dnforum, some names that sell for XXX,XXX you think you would have sold them for
X,XXX?

That reflects how bargaining is so important, I mean sometimes there are some hungry people out there that want a specific domain!
But of course the first offer will be low balling you!

I agree the industry is only growing early stages, the problem had been people can't put up their own sites without html programming, but this is all being bettered with the blogging boom, more people want an online identifier and can easily manipulate a template like wordpress.

Later!

[flybuzz]

they sure have lots of domains.

[RazorNF]

Greed sets in... it happened to me a couple of times... I've turned down offers for very mediocre or worse domain names, which in hindsight, I would have been happy with even half of the offer.

Sometimes end-users, will tell you really how much is the max their willing to offer, and in these cases trying to bargain with them might turn them off... it might be their first time trying to buy a domain name from it's owner and it could be a perfectly decent offer.

In my opinion, if you always have the mindset that you can squeeze another 30% out of them, then you're going to miss out on a lot of sales opportunities...

[hugegrowth]

I don't know if there has to be a 'ceiling' on domain prices. Real estate seems to keep going up - over time - even though it has pullbacks once in a while. I don't think the internet/domains are even close to saturated yet, many businesses and people still don't even own one domain. And they keep coming out with better devices and better websites that encourage people to go online for their entertainment, news, business, shopping, etc. This year has so far been all about the growth in online advertising, more media moving to the internet, growth in 'social' internet use, and polls about how people are watching less tv and going online for longer periods of time. Even established companies like Google and Yahoo haven't fully grown yet and are still looking for more acquisitions and angles to get more eyeballs. I can see why some people say we are still in the first inning of the internet ballgame...

[Bill Roy]

As I am one of those who has 'some' domains specifically priced for the high spending end user (although others are not) I feel I can at least contribute a little here to this discussion.

The internet is a world wide phenomenon that is still relatively in its infancy, as such we have not yet reached a position where we have reached a 'ceiling' on prices of domain names. As companies switch more and more to advertising on the internet rather then conventional advertising (newspapers, radio, tv, etc.) they will simply calculate that owning the best 'advertising websites' (domain names) is cheaper than paying for click throughs. Also by owning and managing such names they will take a controlling interest in the advertising for their sphere of operations, and whilst their competitors spend huge amounts in advertising the owners of the best advertising domains will spend constantly proportionally less (they own the best advertising medium).

At the moment 'most' domainers are actually acting like the small local radio station and accepting adverts to put on their sites at relatively cheap prices (remember it how much the parking site makes out of each advert). All the reports that are coming out say that the advertising money is heading towards the internet and away from conventional advertising outlets, surely this rings bells that internet advertising must be a cheap and effective way for advertisers to advertise! Then consider that as more advertising comes to the internet the prices paid by the advertisers will rise, Google I think it was who first started off in a big way where advertisers had to bid for their position in the advert hierarchy. This will of course lead to a disproportionate rise in the value of 'good' advertising websites and good advertising domain names. On the back of this lesser valued websites and domain names will also increase in value by riding on the back of the good ones.

The real bonus is though that many companies will prefer to 'own the website (domain name) because this will in the medium term turn out cheaper for them than paying constantly for advertising on the website. As stated above this will also diminish the advertising effectiveness of their competitors as they will not have the opportunity to advertise on the website 'owned' by by the buyer.

For advertising purposes a good domain name (website address) is one that the public recognise and associate with. Therefore tyres.com (I have no connection whatsoever with this domain) would be a superb website for Michelin or Dunlop, it is easily recognisable, relevent, and should one of these companies own the website they have an immediate advantage as described above over there competitor. This site, in the 'real world' (not in domainer sales) would easily be worth in the millions of dollars, but at present to a domainer looking to put adverts on the site it is worth considerably less simply because all he/she calculates the value at is a multiple of the annual advertising revenue.

Now I have over 30 domains that are priced at $1 million or over, all of these in advertising terms are easily worth conciderably more than I have them priced at, one is now priced at $25 million, but this has been priced solely for the high spending end user market, a market that is specifically targeted with these domains. On the other hand I have most of my domains priced from $xxx's through to $xx,xxx, these are the ones that are comfortably priced for domainers (we do need bread on the table until a big one goes). I even yesterday went into the chat room to ask opinions on an offer of a $1,000 I had received (presumably from another domainer) and was actually told not to take it as it was way far too low an offer (the domain like most of mine is a ccTLD - and a ccTLD that in the past few months I had been ridiculed for buying!). This shows that the attitude to the value of domain name values is changing constantly, and mainly in a steep upward direction. If this were not so then iREIT and others would not be buying up by the portfolio all the domains they can.

Now a word of caution. Yes there will be dips in domain name value, sometimes perhaps by as much as 30-40% which happen very quickly, but a good business plan will allow you to take this into account for within 2-3 years the domains will be recovering their value if not recovered their value (I base this on various historic economic swings in both the share markets -London and Wall Street, and also the real estate market). In such times the domainer will rely on the advertising revenue from the sites. If you have mortgaged yourself to the hilt to buy domains then you will be in trouble, as with any other investment where you have borrowed too heavily to finance it.

Finally. Dotcom will generally for the foreseeable future be the leader in the domain name world, however, it is my opinion that as advertising on the net takes off (our rocket is still on the launch pad as far as advertising goes) more and more ccTLD's will be seen throughout the world due to their specific suitability for advertising a particular product, an example would be the domain 'So.ap' (I have chosen this as there is not a dot AP suffix available).

Well that is my DNF$4 worth. Now you can shoot my arguements down, but things are happening this way.

[carlton]

... we are still in the first inning of the internet ballgame...

This is closest to the truth.

[Salient]

Anyone who pays anything close to those listed prices for those names is an idiot. Period.

If they get listed prices then I found myself a broker.

[Ian]

Anyone who pays anything close to those listed prices for those names is an idiot. Period.

I second that. Don't go about throwing up cash like one Mr. Moneybags!!

[hugegrowth]

Billbo I agree with all your post, and especially liked how you compare the value of a domain in the 'real world' vs. the domainer world. Valueing a domain simply by PPC revenue does not always make the most sense. If it is a name of one or two words that hits the target market that a company is looking for, is easy to spell and memorable, then it's value would surpass simply # months x $ PPC per month valuation. The best names have to be easily remembered when read once in an ad, and easy to recall and spell if you hear someone say it to you. That is why overture search tool is so valuable, the highly searched terms tell you exactly the words that people are already using, it couldn't be any simpler.

[forumrating]

overpriced, i guess they would be selling very few domains , not even that with such high prices