Originally posted by biggedon
Looks like 'Shak' scores the big dunk.
The .uk market is
very significantly different to that of .com. I cannot emphasise this enough. Shakil Khan's sporting .uk domain names are particularly good and definitely have a substantial value attached. However, define 'substantial'?
I think we all know that 'football.com' would be a six or even seven figure seller. However with .uk things become substantially different. The US, being many times larger than the UK, appears (in my personal opinion) to plough a significant amount of investment into sporting events on a scale that eclipses anything that occurs in the UK.
From watching US broadcasts over here, US sports (American Football as we call it, Ice Hockey, Baseball and Basketball) exist on a scale that makes the entire UK sporting scene look tiny. We've got to remember that California is bigger than the UK, nevermind the other 49 states! You've got vast arenas, stadiums and outdoor facilities spanning your country. I assume these exist in all most every major city. You also seem to commercialise more around your sporting events, with all the celebration and other promotions - e.g. the cheerleading, which is something we don't have over here much, and the Michael Buffer announcers. As a result your sporting industries are vast. The UK's, even with its Football Premier League and Manchester United, is tiny.
The UK only has a single major sports television network, aside from the five main terrestrial channels that also cover sports programming, and I assume that over in the US you have a number of different ones. I believe you even have dedicated channels devoted to particular sports.
So what am I trying to say?
If you're American, and have pretty much never ventured out of the US, your expectations of sport around the world might be squeued by what you're used to at home in the US. A friend of mine recently went to Boston and enjoyed a Baseball game. On his return he commented that it was nothing like anything he'd ever been to over here. He enjoyed it by the way.
The reality of sport outside of the US, and indeed many other things, is that there simply isn't commercialism on anywhere near as grand a scale. Therefore, as a result, quality names like those in Shakil Khan's portfolio are much more difficult to sell or even commercialise. They're great names but if they'd been .com's you could be sure that an entrepreneurial person connected with US sport would have snapped them up by now.
I definitely believe these names to be of value and of top quality. But what you cannot, and musn't, do is apply .com logic when making an appraisal. Domains under .uk simply don't sell in the same way, due to a number of reasons including perhaps a lack of commercialisation, a lack of finances, a lack of understanding of how a good domain name makes a difference (I have called companies offering them great domains and I get idiot secretaries telling me 'we've already got a domain name, so why do we need another?'), and possibly the main factor that is the UK is so much smaller than the US.
In truth I don't know how much these names are worth simply because I have not seen a great many high profile sales of .uk domains. I'd like to value each of them at six digits. However I could quite feasibly see a couple of them only ever getting low five figure offers, simply because things are different over here (for all the reasons I have explained above).
I'd like to see, and I anticipate it may happen one day, .uk improve. Give it a few years and I guess we'll see what happens.
