Has the .COM increase changed the offers you accept?

[nicenicnicenic is verified member.]

Verisign's .COM wholesale increase took effect on November 1.

For those buying and selling domains here, I'm interested in the lower end of the market. When a .COM has sat without a serious enquiry for two or three years, are you more open to a smaller offer now?

Or has the latest increase had more impact on what you buy than what you sell?

 

[accurate]

Dropping more domains and I'm raising prices on better ones.

$1 more adds up when you own a lot of domain names.

 

[ElhagMousab]

The renewal rise hits the buy side first for me, and the sell side much later, if at all. A .COM that has sat idle for two or three years has already told me something: whatever price I had in my head was not being heard. So when someone finally comes with a smaller offer, my answer depends on what the name costs me to keep, not on what it once cost to acquire. If the annual renewal is now several dollars more and the name has produced nothing in three years, a modest offer is usually better than another three years of quiet.

Where I did change behaviour is on the names I would have kept "just in case". Those are the ones I let drop now, which is also why prices on the survivors tend to go up rather than down. You end up holding fewer names, so each one has to carry more.

On the selling side, I have not cut asking prices because of a wholesale increase. Buyers do not price a domain off my renewal bill; they price it off what the name is worth to them. Cutting a price to compensate for a cost the buyer never sees usually just teaches the market that the name was overpriced to begin with.

The practical version: I look at my per-name annual cost, kill the ones that cannot justify it, and leave the good ones where they are. The increase changed how many names I keep, not how cheaply I sell the ones I keep.