closed Wrong Appraisals

[Tricky]

Hi All,

I am seeing some truly depressing price valuations given on this board, I know it is only a bit of specualtive fun [sic], but have we really come down to the point where $50 for a one word generic gTLD's is an ok price?

I beleieve the world economy and dn prices are directly linked (not a new idea I know), whereby if the world economy is on the up, business is confident, trade increases and dn's become valuable once again.

It is like buying and selling shares, buy at the bottom and sell at the top. I think to sell now is to sell at the bottom and let someone make a killing on your name at a later date. Therefore if you do own a decent dn, then hang onto it. By all means put it up for valuation for curiosity sake, but if someone says it is only worth peanuts and offers to buy it from you, then take a moment to think why do they want it, if it is only worth peanuts?

If I want to know how much my car is worth, I would not expect to get a correct market valuation from a dealer who is trying to make money on the transaction, and like wise I would not expect to get a correct market valuation from a dn dealer on a dn I own.

I am not saying most valuations on dnforum are incorrect, a bad name is a bad name, but I also believe a lot of dn dealers use this site and so valuations can sometimes be skewed against the owner in the hope of a profitable deal.

Just my two pence worth - I am sure I will be flamed to death for saying it, but giving $50 valuations means we might as well all forget about dn's, or, some people are not giving meaningful valuations for other reasons.

Tricky

 

[Bob]

Tricky,

When I put up an appraisal, I appraise it according to my experience and in todays market. I have sold well over 300 domain names.

In my experience, just because you have a done word domain does not mean it is valuable. Everybody does the domain name game differnetly. What works for me may or may not work for somebody else. A lot of people find adult names profitable. I have found the opposite. Adult works for them, it does not for me.

The point it that different people see things differntly. One person might see something in a name and think it is worth more money than somebody who does not see something in that same name.

Case in point: Once I picked up a name onthe drop. It was available for 45 minutes after it was released. I watched it and finally decided to reg it. I asked everybody's opinion. NObody liked it. They were saying $50 MAX and said that I wasted a reg fee. 3 weeks later, I sold the name for 5 figures. Moral: I saw something in it that nobody else did, and I was able to capitalize on it.

Happy speculating

-Bob

 

[Whois-Search]

A name is worth what someone will pay for it.

People in here will only pay that much.

 

[DomainPairs]

Which is most valuable hetaerae.com or whores.com. Both one word domains, both have similar meanings.

Undeveloped there is no contest. Developed - who knows, whores.com just resolves to a boring page of links.

"It's not what you've got, it's what you do with it" is very true in the domain name market.

 

[com]

I have soberness.com - one word domain

what is the appraisal value here? $20

what are my thoughts on it? For Sale: $15 only!

 

[ezinestein]

I appraise it according to my experience and in todays market. I have sold well over 300 domain names.

Bob,

How the heck do you go about selling your names. I'd really like to start finding some buyers for mine. Do you contact people directly? Or do you just use things like eBay, greatdomains.com and afternic?

If you do contact people you feel might be interested... do they ever accuse you of spamming them?

I would love some help in the selling area.

Thanks Bob.

Cheers,
ezinestein

 

[rhopperger]

Hey Bob, to know how you sold 300 domains would be incredibly valuable to me. Either I have all-crap names (which is likely as I am new to the domain-game ) or I have no idea how to sell them properly.

A few tips would be greatly appreciated!

And if you'd like to sell a few of mine for an 50% of the profit (after estimated taxes) feel free to contact me.

Reinhard

 

[timechange.com]

How about 250 sold in a year? More than 300 total.

 

[izopod]

When I give appraisals I try to give a "value range appraisal" (VRA--izopod, circa 2003). To give an exact value on a domain is foolish IHMO. For instance, Coffee.net would easily fetch above $5K in my opinion, but less than $10K. I'm not about to put a $6K figure on the domain because there are people out there that would pay more.

So for coffee.net my "Value range appraisal" would be at least $5K but less than $10K. I arrived at this range based on the DQ system I developed. Coffee.net would never score below a 28 and probably would not score higher than a 36.

location: (8)
type: (8)
income generation: (7)
shelf-life: (10)

(DQ) for Coffee.net=33

DQ Legend:

36 to 40: Premium Name (worth over 10K)
33 to 36: Quality Name (worth up to 9,999K)
28 to 32: Above Average Name (worth up to 5 K)
24 to 27: Average (worth up to 1 K)
20 to 23: Below Average (worth up to $500)
16 to 19: Bad, but still above reg fee (worth up to $100)
12 to 15: Reg fee (worth the reg fee)

 

[TurNIC.com]

Originally posted by ezinestein


Bob,

How the heck do you go about selling your names. I'd really like to start finding some buyers for mine. Do you contact people directly? Or do you just use things like eBay, greatdomains.com and afternic?

If you do contact people you feel might be interested... do they ever accuse you of spamming them?

I would love some help in the selling area.

Thanks Bob.

Cheers,
ezinestein

Einstein,

Everybody has his/her method of marketing. This is like Darwin's theory, like birds; some of them fly faster to catch flies, some of them do not fly but eat anything, etc.
When I first started to reg names, I tried spammimg people, Sorry Mole . I even collected all primary hotel groups' addresses and sent them bulk emails. It did not work then I developed another approach that I prefer not to say. I sold some to them.
There is no easy way to learn marketing. You need to read, try, fail and finally success with your methods.

When the time comes and you could sell a name, at which everybody says $0, $50max, for a premium then you are a Reseller. Ask and learn from people. Even no reply to an appraisal thread means something.

SAF

 

[TopNames.com]

I just redirect the domain names to my reseller site. Once they land on my main site, they will see the name is for sale. 75% of my sales come from type-ins.

 

[NamePopper.com]

I basically did the same thing as Ken (TopNames) at first.

All my names were directed to a main site - where I put up a simple page saying.....

"The domain that brought you to this page was scheduled for development - but due to a change in plans
the name is now for sale. For more information contact me @."

It was very successful - and I sold a lot of names that way.

I no longer have that redirect/holding page - because I sold that domain & logo to a member here at the forum.
For that matter - I have sold over 100 names alone - just here at DNFORUM. So I would say that about half my sales have come from 'retail/end users' - and the other half have come from other 'resellers'. Obviously I made a lot more profit from the retail customers. Resellers are a bunch of cheapskates!

 

[timechange.com]

Why not make a nice page like this

 

[DomainPairs]

A blank page is really great for selling. Remember. a lot of people surf with active-x and java[script] turned off. They are often the ones that spend money.

 

[Bob]

Originally posted by ezinestein

How the heck do you go about selling your names.

EZ -

When I first started, I sold about 20 names on the old Afternic. I learned that Afternic was not a good place to sell, but nonetheless, it started me down the path and taught me a few things.

As the quality of Afternic dwindled, I realized that I needed to do something else. It made sense to me that I had to let the surfer know that the domain name was for sale. I ended up writing a traffic counter script that displayed that the domain name was for sale and gave a hyperlink to email me. For a long time, that is how I sold a lot of names. People would type in the name (or get there via a link on an existing website) and they would inquire about it. I had a LOT more inquiries than sales, but with about 2000 hits per day, people were seeing that the name was forsale.

I wrote a script to both count traffic and display a customized page that had the name on it. It was not like "This domain is for sale", but it said "Diablo.org is for sale. Please click here if you are interested". You have to make it easy for the surfer to communicate with you. A LOT of junk email comes through. I was offerd $20 for names that got like 300 hits per day, but the sales will come.

You can accomplish what I did above without any special programming knowledge. All you have to have is one webhosting account. What you do it use myDomain (or any registrar that will provide URL forwarding) and direct it to URL on your server. If you have 25 domain names, you can make 25 differnent "for sale" pages. I had 500ish names and did not want to make that many pages, hence the script.

As time went on (and as one would hope), the quality of my names went up and the inquiries went up as well. ..

One last parting comment - remember that all 300 sold names were not all good sales. That number includes the crappy ones I had that I blew out on eBay for $1/each. About 60 of the names were blow-outs, while the other 200+ were legit sales.

I would be glad to share any more information or what has worked for me. Just ask away.

-Bob

 

[Bob]

Originally posted by 2003
Why not make a nice page like this

Something similar to this is what I did.

However, if your names do not get traffic, then the forsale page will be less likely to be successful.

-Bob

 

[timechange.com]

I totally agree with Bob on the aspects of a single gateway page for all domains, that intelligently provides a form inquiring for the sale of a particular domain.

This way, I can also forward all traffic to a single web site, if I want to.

Now, if only I had been disciplined enough to do the same for each of the 500+ domains but some sell too fast.

 

[timechange.com]

Originally posted by Bob


Something similar to this is what I did.

However, if your names do not get traffic, then the forsale page will be less likely to be successful.

-Bob

For some reason, it worked bautifully with any domain that I've sold to this day since I installed the script 6 months ago. It also helps increase the Alexa ranking of the main web site (fused.net)

 

[lawpsych]

Speaking of Alexa ratings ...


I'm really, really stumped. My new domain name site, ForensicDomans.com, which is not even complete by any real stretch of the imagination, has gone from an Alexa rating of over 4,000,000 to 104,000 in less than 2 weeks, and it's not even finished yet. I have not had a chance to add in any meta tags and I have not submitted it to a single Search Engine.

How, on earth is this possible? Believe me, I'm not complaining, and this doesn't seem to be a fluke. In fact, the numbers have been coming down steadily, but extremely quickly, and I have not done anything to make this happen.

If I'm doing something right accidentally, I would certainly like to know what it is, so that I don't goof it up by messing up something that is working.

But what in the world does this mean? Any help in understanding this strange phenomenon will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks so much!

Best regards,
Sheila

 

[timechange.com]

It simply means that a lot of people who use the Alexa toolbar visit your site