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.

 

[nicenicnicenic is verified member.]

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.

Good point! A domain can go years without an inquiry just because the sales lander is broken or the listing is buried on the marketplaces. That's the first thing I'd rule out before calling it no demand.

 

[DomainDan]

Hi, honestly a dollar or so a year doesn't move my floor on any single name, a $500 offer still covers a lot of years of the increase. Where I feel it is the total bill across the whole portfolio, so it just makes the cull before renewals a bit harsher.

 

[taunon]

Agree with DomainDan. A dollar doesn't move my floor on any single name, but it moves the break-even on new regs. At 1% sell-through, a 100-name hand-reg portfolio now costs about $1,100+/yr to carry, so the average sale needs to be north of $1,500 just to justify the time. My response has been to buy fewer, better names: I only hand-reg in niches with live funding (agents, telehealth, payments), and I drop anything that hasn't had a single inquiry by its second renewal. On offers: for a name with 3 quiet years, I'd take a sensible low-to-mid three-figure offer now. The renewal increase isn't the reason. It's that three quiet years is the market's answer.

 

[accurate]

Another $100 adds up for large portfolio holders.

 

[nicenicnicenic is verified member.]

Hi, honestly a dollar or so a year doesn't move my floor on any single name, a $500 offer still covers a lot of years of the increase. Where I feel it is the total bill across the whole portfolio, so it just makes the cull before renewals a bit harsher.

You may be right. One number I'd find useful is how much of last year's renewal bill was actually covered by domain sales. It shows how much trimming is really needed, which beats reacting to the extra dollar on each name.

Agree with DomainDan. A dollar doesn't move my floor on any single name, but it moves the break-even on new regs. At 1% sell-through, a 100-name hand-reg portfolio now costs about $1,100+/yr to carry, so the average sale needs to be north of $1,500 just to justify the time. My response has been to buy fewer, better names: I only hand-reg in niches with live funding (agents, telehealth, payments), and I drop anything that hasn't had a single inquiry by its second renewal. On offers: for a name with 3 quiet years, I'd take a sensible low-to-mid three-figure offer now. The renewal increase isn't the reason. It's that three quiet years is the market's answer.

Yes, that's an interesting point about focusing on funded niches. I'd also look at what names the startups in those sectors are actually using.

Another $100 adds up for large portfolio holders.

Setting a renewal budget for the whole portfolio in advance could make those decisions easier too. Each renewal looks cheap on its own... until you see the total bill.

 

[DomainDan]

You may be right. One number I'd find useful is how much of last year's renewal bill was actually covered by domain sales. It shows how much trimming is really needed, which beats reacting to the extra dollar on each name.

Yes, that's an interesting point about focusing on funded niches. I'd also look at what names the startups in those sectors are actually using.

Setting a renewal budget for the whole portfolio in advance could make those decisions easier too. Each renewal looks cheap on its own... until you see the total bill.

That ratio is a good reality check. It's easy to get stuck on the extra dollar per name and miss that the real question is whether sales cover the whole bill at all.

 

[ElhagMousab]

The number that would actually settle this thread is the one DomainDan raised: what share of last year's renewal bill the portfolio's own sales paid for. I keep that ratio for the ccTLD side I work in, and the pattern there is not kind. A list where sales fund roughly a fifth of renewals is not a portfolio, it is a subscription you are paying to keep a story alive.

Two things I would add to the trimming test.

First, three quiet years is usually not a market statement, it is an exposure statement. A name with no enquiry in three years is often one that nobody outside your own head has ever seen. Before I drop a name on silence alone, I check whether the silence came after any real attempt to reach a buyer, or whether the name has simply been parked in a marketplace search box and left there. Those are different problems. One costs money, the other costs nothing to fix once.

Second, the funded-niche point cuts deeper than it looks. When a sector has money, the companies in it buy exact words, and they buy them early. So the question is not whether a niche is hot but whether a live company already uses that word as its own address. I measured that on a ccTLD recently across a set of single dictionary words, and the split was blunt: the words serving an operating business were a minority, and a comparable number were parked or on a broker lander, most of them on the same parking nameservers. Renewal increases are painful for the second group and almost irrelevant for the first, because a name that answers real traffic is priced by the buyer's business, not by your annual cost.

So my own order of cuts goes: no enquiry after two renewals, then no live user, then a word that a funded sector has already solved with a compound. The extra dollar per name decides almost nothing on its own. It just makes me write the list down earlier in the year, when there is still time to pick which names deserve the next twelve months.