Flicker .com Receives $600k Offer

[companyone]

Flicker.com Receives $600k Offer
Monday, June 11th, 2007

Not-so-typo domain of popular Flickr.com service accepting offers.

I’ve never understood why these Web 2.0 companies have such horrible domain names. It’s hard enough getting people to remember your web address. So why drop vowels out of your domain? In January I wrote:

As a domainer, I look at a lot of these web 2.0 companies and laugh at their domain names. They are perhaps the worst domain names a company could ever choose. Flickr.com? (A Yahoo! company (NASDAQ: YHOO). Talkr.com? Frappr.com? The only thing these domains are good for are sending traffic to Flicker.com, Talker.com, and Frapper.com.

Well, the owners of Flicker.com have put it up for sale and have turned down 14 offers in the past two months. The latest offer was for $600,000. According to a notice on the Flicker.com web page, the site attracts over 150,000 type-ins per month. I believe it — it has an Overture+Ext score of 4,301. Although most of these visitors are looking for the popular photo sharing site owned by Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO), the Flicker.com notice doesn’t mention the site and goes out of its way to point out that Flicker is a generic term.

The final sale price will depend on if someone is willing to take on any legal risk associated with this domain name. Sure, the domain predates the Flickr service and Flickr is a horrible name, but that doesn’t mean someone can’t sue if the domain is used for a similar purpose.

Source




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Peace,
Dan

 

[thevirtual]

Good article, I actually thought the thread was about Flickr being sold for $600k. lol

site attracts over 150,000 type-ins per month... it has an Overture+Ext score of 4,301"

Interesting, didn't know overture only counted such a small fraction of type-ins...

 

[gmac17]

you have to figure that overture only counts what happens in the yahoo search box. Yahoo has maybe 20% of the search share, but more importantly - more people will type it in directly than will put it in the search box so the numbers are just a percentage - and they are ALL over the place.

 

[Rarethings]

They should have taken the $600k.

 

[hugegrowth]

now watch Yahoo change the name of Flickr to "Yahoo Photos", and Flicker.com will be left selling lighters and bird books.

 

[petrosc]

now watch Yahoo change the name of Flickr to "Yahoo Photos", and Flicker.com will be left selling lighters and bird books.

lol

 

[DNWizardX9]

They should have taken the offer and run to the bank and not looked back.

 

[groundctrl]

now watch Yahoo change the name of Flickr to "Yahoo Photos", and Flicker.com will be left selling lighters and bird books.

that would be utterly hilarious, but i doubt it. Flickr has a great reputation for building community, and their users would utterly abandon the place were they to switch it to being Yahoo-like in functionality.

 

[Fearless]

This looks like an Ebay bid.

 

[GAMEFINEST]

it will be worth 1 million next year

 

[Rarethings]

it will be worth 1 million next year

1 million yen, perhaps.

 

[acronym007]

This could easily be a shill bid, there is no way to know the identity of the bidder or if the bid is legit. I think it's funny they just decline that outright. $600k is nothing to shake a stick at. Not to say it's not worth it but there is too much cloak and dagger surrounding the website in my opinion.

 

[GAMEFINEST]

1 million rupees

 

[Fearless]

He would jump on $600K. I heard he paid $55K a few months ago. Even though the registration date is before Flickr TM his purchase date is after. He can try and monetize but almost anything he does will look like TM infringement and then Yahoo gets the name for free. The site looks like Yahoo bait to me.

 

[financialtraffic]

The whole story is ridiculous.
Flicker.com is not worth $600,000. The legal risks are too great. Anyone who doesn't understand that is a fool of an investor.

Although this is a generic domain, the brand Flickr feeds Flicker at least 98 or 99 percent of its type-in traffic. So, what we have here is a generic typo domain with very limited development value away from a brand that's already well developed. Try selling products to Flickr.com typo traffic. My guess is the conversion rates will be next to nothing.

 

[hugegrowth]

that's part of the problem, 99% of people going to flicker.com are expecting to land on flickr. When they don't, most probably push the back button. You'd have to be creative to make it work as something else, to make those people stop and look at what's on the site.

 

[maroulis]

The whole story is ridiculous.
Flicker.com is not worth $600,000. The legal risks are too great. Anyone who doesn't understand that is a fool of an investor.

Although this is a generic domain, the brand Flickr feeds Flicker at least 98 or 99 percent of its type-in traffic. So, what we have here is a generic typo domain with very limited development value away from a brand that's already well developed. Try selling products to Flickr.com typo traffic. My guess is the conversion rates will be next to nothing.

This traffic would convert amazingly well for Yahoo obviously... Agree w/comments on the sale page to be looking like a Yahoo bait....

On the other hand, if by monetizing you mean PPC then obviously TM implications, if developed as something else rather than photo-sharing then there wouldn't be an issue and the footprint from pageviews would be enormous.....

 

[Rarethings]

He would jump on $600K. I heard he paid $55K a few months ago. Even though the registration date is before Flickr TM his purchase date is after. He can try and monetize but almost anything he does will look like TM infringement and then Yahoo gets the name for free. The site looks like Yahoo bait to me.

Agreed. Yahoo's not gonna bite, though

 

[AlienGG]

I clicked "submit" and wola......

Object not found!
The requested URL was not found on this server. The link on the referring page seems to be wrong or outdated. Please inform the author of that page about the error. 

If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster. 

Error 404
www.flicker.com
Apache/2.0.46 (CentOS)

 

[Fearless]

I clicked "submit" and wola......

Object not found!
The requested URL was not found on this server. The link on the referring page seems to be wrong or outdated. Please inform the author of that page about the error. 

If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster. 

Error 404
www.flicker.com
Apache/2.0.46 (CentOS)

Yahoo tried to bid $1.5M and got an error.