closed Advice? PrintableCoupons.Com - Pending SEDO offer of $75,000

[DN BROKER]

After going through 5 pages of Google for "printable coupons" I gave up. Your domain isn't there. Sell.

Could not agree more.

 

[bvesh]

Are you serious Acro cant you see that it is parked with adsense for domains? All domains parked with them have noindex, nofollow for robots. There is no way you should be selling for just 4.2 revenue multiple unless you want the cash. If you can sustain $1000 a month with it just keep it going or make a counter offer.

 

[Zurio]

Thank you all for the input. It's great to see so many people who understand my problem.

Although I own about 500 domains, I'm not what most of you would call a "Domainer", although some of my oddball domains were purchased with the intent to potentially sell them later.

My primary business is Printable coupons, more specifically, printable *local* coupons. I've sold over 20,000 local merchant listings, in about 7 or 8 states. It's a very small niche, with only a few competitors, mainly companies like ValPak.

Arco
After going through 5 pages of Google for "printable coupons" I gave up. Your domain isn't there. Sell.

This is a fundamental break from standard Domainer / SEO philosophy. I've never believed in SEO or given much credibility to a business model which relies on search engines as a primary benchmark.

I'm sure most of you would debate this with a great deal of passion, but for me, unless your revenue is based upon a quick one-shot sale, a site that gets a high percentage of their traffic from search engines is not doing well.

Recently a friend of mine proudly showed me his statistics that showed he had some pretty big numbers and more than 90% of them came from search engines like Google. To me that means that about 90% of his audience never comes back.

When I look at the analytics for my site, most of my traffic is still direct type-in. This means that they remember me and are coming back for more. Although I generally rank #1 in my main category "Local Coupons" in search engines, and I get a fair number of first time visitors that way, I get even more traffic from people searching for coupons for specific merchants on my site... I get lots of traffic when people search for things like "Pizza and Brew Coupons" or "Pronto Pizza coupons".

To me, the goal for any successful web site is ultimately to get direct type traffic, where you don't compete with anyone who may be listed next to you. If your audience know you by name, they will keep coming back when they want you have to offer.

The reason PrintableCoupons.Com doesn't show up in search engines is that like my other coupon domains, it's always been used to just point to my other site. The fact that it now brings in about $1500 as a Google parked page without any SEO or showing up in search engines is a proof that type-in traffic has value. I guess a lot of people looking for printable coupons just type printablecoupons.com into the URL.

I'm sure the buyer knows the domain itself is not ranked in search engines right now... they are not trying to buy the existing traffic for the domain. They want it because it's easy to remember and must directly describe their product. Sedo doesn't show you the name of the buyer, but I can assume they plan on launching or re-branding their site and can't find a better coupon domain that is easy to remember.

For what it's worth, I started buying coupon domains 13 years ago, when they were a lot easier to get... and got quite a few good ones (over 140 of them), largely to prevent others from getting a better one than mine.

picassoface
Why not just sell the name sans the business and use one of your other great coupon names for your main money making business ?
I think the name alone is worth $150,000. You can use that to further build/promote your main site. Doesn't matter who the
competitor is as long as you can achieve Top spot on google. 150k can get alot of SEO done

The offer is just for the domain. I'm not even considering selling my business. I've never branded that domain. Until recently when you typed it, you got my other site, so technically the brand doesn't exist.

The idea of taking a larger offer and using the money to promote the main site is still floating in my head, but as I mentioned I wouldn't invest a cent into SEO... I simply don't believe in it. I would invest it into more TV, radio and print ads, which promote the brand.

My main debate is how much would be worth it considering they will gain a very easy to remember domain.

JB Lions
I wouldn't sell it at that price, way too low. I have a coupon code site myself for the last 8+ years and know couponers that make more than that per month. Printable coupons are a little different animal than online coupon codes but that's a very nice domain, some big players like coupons.com, smartsource, etc with printable coupon sites.

Dirty SEO
Zurio, ask yourself one question... Are you more of a marketer or a domainer? Unless you NEED the money right now, go with your stronger skills.

You've hit the nail on the head. I'm a marketer, not a domainer. Although I wouldn't mind getting rid of some of my other domains that are outside my main business model.

I've had some good and bad years... some years nearly a million dollars in sales, but because of a couple of bad contracts I signed nearly lost the company, so I'm now re-launching and my plan is bigger and better than ever.

Because I realized that coupon codes were .0001% of my income from printable coupons (where there is lots of competition), I removed almost every "coupon code" from my site and decided I will focus entirely on printable local coupons. There are only a few companies that do it, mostly companies like ValPak that focus more at mailings and magazine inserts. I met with one of them years back and he confided that their parent company can't focus on the online market because it competes with their mailing revenue.

This gives me an opportunity to become a major player in printable local coupons... My software and new business plan are finally coming together. I'm investing every cent on making it work.

Now I have this to think about. I'm obligated to make a counter offer on Sedo within 7 days, but I'm just worried about who this competitor is... and what I may lose. If this is their opening offer, they must have deep pockets... so I'm also thinking that if I eventually back out, they will just look for another domain to buy and I'll face them either way, but at least I won't hand them their brand name in a nice little package.

TheLegendaryJP
You only have one question to ask yourself, can you do more with the $75k NOW or with the stream of revenue.

I would love to run national TV and radio ads... instead of just local stations in a few states.

draggar
That's a great domain especially with how popular coupon sites are but there are some questions that could be HUGE factors if you're looking for an appraisal based on traffic / revenue.

Do you have other domains pointed to this domain? If so, what % of the traffic goes to this domain? You can safely assume that the the same % of the revenue is coming from the pointed domains.

You also said that "recently" you parked it - how recent? 1 month? 6 months? People who want to buy it based on revenue will want to see at least 3 months revenue (usually 6-12 or even 24 months) to be able to make a good guess on how much to pay for the domain.

How much did the revenue drop from your main site when you stopped forwarding this domain to it? Would it be worth taking the revenue hit on that site when you sell this domain?

Until recently almost all of my domains pointed to one site (not printablecoupons.com). The experimental move was only a couple of months ago. There was a drop in revenue, but it balanced out with the money earned from parking... the big difference was that this parking traffic will never come back. I always used my other domains and search engines as a way to farm *new* traffic, but the real audience was based upon return traffic, which is lost when parking.

I'm going to need to make a counter offer within the next couple of days. Because it's binding, I think the thing to do is put a real high number down, and explain my reason. Perhaps they will either offer a much bigger amount... or offer some sort of link back or even decide to share content... in a best case scenario, perhaps they will offer to distribute my coupons on their site and vice versa.

---------- Post added at 11:27 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:45 AM ----------

I had to place a counter offer... So I posted this:

Thank you for making your offer. After giving this some thought and seeking advice of others I have decided that this domain is too valuable to me to sell at that price.

Unlike some of my other domains (also listed on Sedo), this one describes my product better than any of them. I have only temporarily moved the domain away from my main site while I prepare for a re-launch as a print-only coupon site.

In addition to revenue loss, I also have to factor in market share loss by giving away a very memorable domain to a competitor.

Thanks for understanding and feel free to browse my other Sedo listings for another coupon domain. Some of them are appraised at more than this, but don't compete as directly with my core product than this one.

Since I'm not allowed to just cancel the negotiations and any offer is binding, I just made the offer big to prevent me from being locked into something that would hurt me later.

Perhaps he'll consider one of my other domains.

---------- Post added at 11:33 AM ---------- Previous post was at 11:27 AM ----------

For what it's worth... I feel like I'm on "Deal or No Deal"... I just turned down $75K because I'm convinced it's a losing deal.

 

[Gerry]

That said, the "lame" printable coupon market is not about search engines, SEO, affiliate links or click- through payoffs. I earn my income when people print my coupons and bring them into brick and mortar stores.

I am not going to go back and read some of the lame comments but whoever called this a "lame" printable coupon market is seriously out of touch.

Daily, I see CVS Pharmacy commercials for their new kiosk at the entrance for people to perform the task of - you guessed it - obtaining their printable coupons.

Couponing is one again huge and typically featured in someone's news stories on line and on network TV.

I think it was NBC nightly news that featured a woman who is a coupon pro and she went into a grocery store and purchased over $300 worth of items and her total actual cost to her after all those coupons was 42 cents.

Not to mention that I get via email nearly every day for a printable coupon to spend and save, most notably from Staples and other electronic merchants.

This is a great name but very difficult to gauge because it is affected by market conditions.

With that said, I believe the economic slump will continue for a while and feel that this name has added potential because of that - a good name made great and highly relevant to today's economy.

But very difficult to peg a price without knowing what this can actually take in per month.

If you made $1500 in the first month with Adsense, this is a great indicator of the potential.

If Google is shelling out a whooping :cough: 10% of actual income generated, then this name may actually be capable of knocking down $10K-$15K per month from direct advertisers.

Take a look at a site called SlickDeals dot net.

This site is fed by a community of users (large base) who scour the internet and find and post great deals.

Using this as a model of the type of community and forum that can be created, the use could be quite heavy with consumers posted coupons on a consumer-to-consumer basis.

You big bucks comes from merchants that want to buy ads or a fee based system to post a link to their site on your site.

The potential (if done right and marketed right) could easily top 75K in one year.

Take some of that money generated by adsense and put in back into advertising and you potentially have a gem of a name that can conceivably eclipse $75K annually.

But it will take some money and time to do and do it right.

---------- Post added at 12:21 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:10 PM ----------

This is a fundamental break from standard Domainer / SEO philosophy.

If you have google analytics running this would give you a very detailed tally of so many factors.

A couple of stats that I like to see is time spent on site and return users.

 

[Zurio]

Yes. I use Google Analytics, which is how I know that most of my audience is not from search engines.

Don't get me wrong, search engines are important... a lot of people first find us that way, but to me the non-search engine audience is a true measurement of my marketing success or failure. I don't like seeing a large percentage coming from search engines... that means people are not coming back, or my radio / print campaign is not working.

Take this site for example. Most of us never come here from a search engine. In my case, I never did and I would imagine most of you either bookmark it or come directly. I would imagine the analytics support this.

With that said, I believe the economic slump will continue for a while and feel that this name has added potential because of that - a good name made great and highly relevant to today's economy.

You are correct. The coupon market nearly doubled when the economy slumped. People tend to think about ways to save money when they have less of it. This is also because when the market slumps, the media likes to do stories about ways to save money... so they mention coupons quite a bit.

---------- Post added at 01:07 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:36 PM ----------

Acro
After going through 5 pages of Google for "printable coupons" I gave up. Your domain isn't there. Sell.

I keep thinking about this quote. It's funny how so many people think this is so important.

When people buy domains, do you think they're only buying the existing audience... or the potential audience?

For example, Microsoft wasn't the original owner of Bing.Com. When they bought the domain, did they care how much of an audience it had? No. Their goal was to buy a memorable domain. The same is true for Coupon.Com. They bought the domain from somebody I know for millions. Before that he used it for a message board and made nothing off it... and had no audience. The buyer had a coupon engine with a terrible domain. It was a perfect fit.

If you were launching a new printable coupon site and you had the following choices, which would you decide?


1. BigCouponBonanzaWorld.Info - Assume for this it has 100,000 monthly visitors and 10 Page Rank

2. Vovio.Com - New domain... No coupon in the name. No audience, no Page Rank

3. PrintableCoupons.Com - Assume for this it has ZERO existing audience or Page Rank

Trying to find a coupon domain, you find #1, it has coupons in the name, search engine rank and an audience, but would your radio / tv / print ads fall on deaf ears?

#2 is brand new. You could run ads and build an audience, but since you don't have coupons in the name... would people who hear the ads remember it's a coupon site?

#3 may not have an audience... but wouldn't it be easier to promote?

When you buy a site, you want to buy their audience, software and reputation. For a domain, all you want is something easy to remember. That's their main purpose.

These people don't know or care what the traffic is for that domain. I assume they plan to promote it, and build their own audience.

As I mentioned, for a basic one-shot retail site, a good listing in a search engine is important. A visitor looks for a "Toy Boat", they click the first one and buy it. But for a portal, you need to keep people coming back again and again.

 

[Theo]

Are you serious Acro cant you see that it is parked with adsense for domains? All domains parked with them have noindex, nofollow for robots. There is no way you should be selling for just 4.2 revenue multiple unless you want the cash. If you can sustain $1000 a month with it just keep it going or make a counter offer.

I am not debating the multiple. All I am saying is that the domain is not found in Google search for the EXACT TERMS and instead, a blogspot.com blog is #1. Big mistake from a seller's standpoint. It's as good as banned. IMO selling at $75k is a good move.

 

[JB Lions]

$75,000 is horrible, I don't think you understand the coupon market. And if somebody ever wanted to rank with that domain, don't think it would be that hard. SEO wise, would be pretty easy, branding is pretty much built in, links in, easy to come by. In front of the right people, would sell for multiples of that.

 

[bvesh]

Acro, domains that are parked with Adsense for Domains CANNOT be indexed by google thats because they put a little piece of code in there that tells the robots not to do it. Its not because the domain isn't valuable im sure if he puts up a proper site and gets some backlinks off his other coupon businesses he could have this domain on the first page in no time at all.

 

[Theo]

bvesh - that, I understand. At the same time, when selling a little known restaurant that makes good food but nobody knows where it is, brings the options of selling it significantly down. If this domain would sell for 6 figures as some are professing, then try selling it at TRAFFIC. In my opinion, the $75k cash offer *now* is better than 4 1/2 years of expected (and not assured) revenue.

 

[james2002]

75k is not a bad offer

 

[south]

I like the bird in the hand theory for this one.

 

[Zurio]

bvesh
Acro, domains that are parked with Adsense for Domains CANNOT be indexed by google thats because they put a little piece of code in there that tells the robots not to do it. Its not because the domain isn't valuable im sure if he puts up a proper site and gets some backlinks off his other coupon businesses he could have this domain on the first page in no time at all.

You are correct. Before moving domains around, several of my domains ranked in the top 5 under "printable coupons" in Google. Sometimes #1, but mostly in the top 5. I'm still #1 under "Local Coupons", but as I said I didn't care that much about how I ranked using generic terms like that. The majority of my search engine traffic searched for specific local merchant coupons such as "Spiga Ristorante Coupons", "Casa May Coupons". With 20,000 local merchant listings in hundreds of cities, there are tons of keywords that get found...

The key point is that if they want to build traffic with that domain... it wouldn't take long. Radio / TV / Print ads would be solid investments because it's easier to remember than "SuperMegaCouponBonanza.Info". Search engines will once again find it when there is content, the more content... the better the rank, plus it gets an extra boost because the domain itself is a popular keyword search.

bvesh - that, I understand. At the same time, when selling a little known restaurant that makes good food but nobody knows where it is, brings the options of selling it significantly down. If this domain would sell for 6 figures as some are professing, then try selling it at TRAFFIC. In my opinion, the $75k cash offer *now* is better than 4 1/2 years of expected (and not assured) revenue.

The key to remember is that they don't want the traffic... just the name. Using your restaurant analogy, they are not buying the restaurant nobody can find, but the unforgettable name of the restaurant that they want to call their new one that they will advertise.

If you wanted to create a national restaurant with a catchy name, then find a small unknown place with a perfect unforgettable name to fit your menu... but they own the trademark, you'd buy the name and launch your own restaurant.

It happens all the time... like when an unknown coupon company called ValuePass.Com bought the domain Coupons.Com for several million dollars... even though ValPass had almost zero audience and zero search rank. ValuePass had lots of coupons but it was a terrible name for a coupon site. The new name didn't have any audience or search rank, but clearly it was a smart move. With better name in hand, they secured more sponsor's coupons and their audience grew. They brought in over $100 million last year.

---------- Post added at 10:53 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:45 PM ----------

I like the bird in the hand theory for this one.

Exactly!

That's why I rejected it. To me the "bird in my hand" is my domain. Why risk losing it to a competitor? I won't risk losing it unless I know for sure I'm guaranteed the two in the bush.

 

[Theo]

PrintableCoupons is not equal to Coupons. By all means negotiate a higher offer, if you feel justified to do so. If however you feel a slight knot in your stomach, knowing that you might be throwing $75,000 in the garbage, then it's time to face reality: the offer is more than what the name is worth in the open market.

 

[south]

Exactly!

That's why I rejected it. To me the "bird in my hand" is my domain. Why risk losing it to a competitor? I won't risk losing it unless I know for sure I'm guaranteed the two in the bush.

Sorry, but I meant the opposite. To be clear, I'd take the offer.

Good luck either way you go.

 

[Zurio]

Acro
PrintableCoupons is not equal to Coupons.

I agree. I know it's worth much less, but I was using it as an example of how Coupons.Com had zero audience or coupons ... and ValuePass had coupons a terrible name, but they still purchased the domain regardless of the size of the audience simply because it would be easier to promote that name than their terrible one. After the purchase, they still had zero audience, but much more potential promoting the new name than the old one.

Right now, there are thousands of coupon code sites... but very few printable coupon sites. So if you were going to start a new printable coupon site, there are very few domain names that would clearly define you... and that are not already taken.

Acro
If however you feel a slight knot in your stomach, knowing that you might be throwing $75,000 in the garbage, then it's time to face reality: the offer is more than what the name is worth in the open market.

The funny thing for me is that I never actually considered selling them in the open market... While re-tooling the site, I tinkered with some of the domains and suddenly a flood of offers started coming in. I'm suddenly getting a crash course in domaining.

Before this experiment, if anyone went to one of my other domains, they either were directed to my main site, or were brought to an internal site I use to catalog my domains called CouponDomains.Com, that essentially said "These are my domains... they are NOT for sale... please don't ask".

So I guess the reason I don't have a knot in my stomach is that I wasn't actually expecting any offers. When I'm done re-tooling my main site, I'll start using the old domains again... except now I think I can see which domains are getting the most attention... and perhaps will become spin-offs.

I know in my best year I was able to bring almost a million dollars in revenue to my main coupon domain, so to me each one has just as much potential should I decide to compete with myself.

The bigger issue still remains... Regardless of my revenue potential as a spin-off... would having a better name be a game changer for a competitor looking for a better domain?

Another funny thing is that although this domain has a deep value to me, an automated appraisal of PrintableCoupons.Com from Estibot values it at only $20k... and it appraises CouponsOnline.Com at $94k, but with my focus on printable coupons, they are equal, ditto for InternetCoupons.Com, which they value at under $6k.

I guess it's got to do with relevance to the content. If you have a domain that exactly matches your content... that value increases in ways an automated appraisal can never understand. As such, having such a domain gives you an edge over your competition. Tire companies want to be Tires.Com, toy companies would love to be Toys.Com and apparently my printable coupon competitors want to be PrintableCoupons.Com.

 

[JB Lions]

PrintableCoupons is not equal to Coupons. By all means negotiate a higher offer, if you feel justified to do so. If however you feel a slight knot in your stomach, knowing that you might be throwing $75,000 in the garbage, then it's time to face reality: the offer is more than what the name is worth in the open market.

Still have to disagree. If you posted that in an affiliate marketing forum, they probably would laugh at that number. As Zurio pointed out, Coupons.com sold for several million.

Exact Matches:
coupons - 823,000
printable coupons - 201,000

Now that's just printable coupons searches.

The site would be very easy to rank on page 1. Besides the "printable coupons" traffic, if the site is built out, you could rank for merchant x printable coupons.

exact searches
bath and body works printable coupons - 18,100
pampers printable coupons - 18,100
huggies printable coupons -14,800

now imagine hundreds/thousands of merchants

And it's making $1500 on a parked page. Now imagine how much it could make built out. All the free traffic from the search engines, that site could easily get all kinds of free press built out, go the social media route, get active there etc. Probably would make more than $75,000 a month.

Somebody would get a steal at that price, if they didn't build the site out themselves, probably would flip it for many multiples.

 

[Zurio]

I agree... by the way, another factor is that like most of my domains, I also registered some common variants.... Printable-Coupons.Com, and PrintibleCoupons.Com (with an i misspelling).

The hyphenated version gets about $350 - $300 per month... I'm not sure if the buyer even knows I have those. The funny thing is if he ends up buying the regular version, those versions are dead to me because it would be worthless to advertise the hyphenated version.

 

[valeria]

Again $75,000 was a very good offer. I doubt anybody will pay more then $75,000 for it. But maybe the guys who offers $75k will offer a bit more. You can of course prove me wrong.

 

[Infoproliferati]

Let's say you sold the domain for $75,000. Would you be willing to pay the same amount to get it back? Would you be willing to pay 125k? At what price WOULDN'T you be willing to purchase your domain? Now if you are looking to sell the domain, start with the 'I wouldn't pay this much for my domain' price. Of course, the price should be determined within reason. Be sure to factor in the loss of market share (based on current figures only) into your price. You can then decide to negotiate at this point.

If you decline the 75k offer, it means you are willing to pay 75k to keep the domain.

 

[Zurio]

valeria
Again $75,000 was a very good offer. I doubt anybody will pay more then $75,000 for it. But maybe the guys who offers $75k will offer a bit more. You can of course prove me wrong.

It seems to me that the consensus here among members who know the coupon market is that it's worth at least that much, and some say a lot more. For those unfamiliar to the coupon market, it's no more valuable than OfficeChairs.Com would be to somebody outside the office chair market.

The key seems to be who the domain owner is. If I owned OfficeChairs.Com, I would have a hard time earning serious money from it. Some banners and affiliate links could bring in some money, but owning that domain could put a small chair company on the map.

In my case, I am in the printable coupon market, and I have a track record for using a coupon domain to earn 7 figures. When I started out, none of my domains had traffic, but an easy to remember domain made it pretty easy to run radio, TV and print ads to get visitors to remember our name.

This far I have not heard back from the buyer. I told him that I wouldn't sell the domain unless there was a much higher offer, but suggested he look at my list of other coupon domains for something less strategic to me. So far, no word yet. For what it's worth, I'm glad he didn't make me an offer. I hate temptation like that.

Let's say you sold the domain for $75,000. Would you be willing to pay the same amount to get it back? Would you be willing to pay 125k? At what price WOULDN'T you be willing to purchase your domain? Now if you are looking to sell the domain, start with the 'I wouldn't pay this much for my domain' price. Of course, the price should be determined within reason. Be sure to factor in the loss of market share (based on current figures only) into your price. You can then decide to negotiate at this point.

If you decline the 75k offer, it means you are willing to pay 75k to keep the domain.

I already declined it, so the answer is yes. I just lost $75K by not selling it. The odd thing is I'm still not planning on using it.

Let's put it this way. I have a lot of good coupon domains, but my marketing and branding is centered around another domain. Until recently the other domains all pointed to the main domain, which gives me some extra traffic and give me the opportunity to re-brand myself later if I want.

Just as importantly to me is that they prevent a competitor from using the domain.

To best illustrate this, when you think of flowers... what brands come to mind?

For years it was just FTD and Teleflora. Years later, when vanity 800 numbers were the rage, 1-800-FLOWERS came along with zero stores... but somehow they grabbed massive market share, just because they had an easy to remember name and number.

Since then, all three have spent millions building their brands. Do you think history could repeat itself and an unknown could enter the market with a name like Flowers.Com? Not this time. 1-800-Flowers owns the domain... not that they advertise it or need to re-brand themselves. They still brand themselves as 1-800-Flowers. The sole purpose of owning the domain for them is making sure nobody else gets gets the same advantage they had with the phone number.