Location, location, location.
On the Internet, a good domain name is the online equivalent of that corner lot in the neighborhood with good schools. The problem is, all the good names are taken and only “fixer-uppers” are left. That’s why you have companies called Flickr, Rowdii, Weebly, and Sedo — which auctions off domain names to the highest bidder.
Did You Know?
- According to GoDaddy.com, there are 456,976 possible 4-letter .com domain names. Of those, only 0.7% remain unregistered.
- Sex.com holds the record for the most expensive domain name ever. It sold for $14 million in 2007.
“Domaining” is the art and science of domain-name speculation. It turns out that online real estate is much cheaper than the real thing: you can register domains for under $10 a year. And with the potential to strike it rich by selling to some individual or company with deep pockets, it’s easy to understand the appeal. No lawns to mow, no rent to collect, only 1′s and 0′s in the ether.
But those kinds of large price tag sales are rare. A more common way to monetize your domain is to place some text ads or directory ads that look like search results. Most of these worthless sites won’t show up in Google’s index, but instead rely on “type-in traffic” — where the user just types the domain name into his browser to see what’s there. For more obscure names, traffic is undeniably low, but it doesn’t take much to cover your cost. And for a common misspelling of a popular site, it could be a big moneymaker.
I haven’t played these games, but do own a handful of domains. Most are bookmarked for future projects. Some I’ll let expire when I realize I’m never going to do anything with it or when I think of a better one to replace it. My favorite? BetterThanDuctTape.com is going to be your future source for all spare car parts.
Dot-coms are much more valuable than dot-nets, but it’s hard to quantify how much more valuable they are. The owner of shoesrus.com had an idea: $5000. That was three years ago when I said, “no thanks.” I’ve made a number of attempts to contact him since to make a counter-offer but haven’t had any luck. Oh well, you live and learn on your first big project.
One of my first domains was NJLEnterprises.com, a quick site built in college for my company at the time. After moving across the country and changing company names, it had fallen out of use. Then some guy called me randomly one day and wanted to by it for $100. Deal.
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Much better than selling lonely domain names is to sell full blown sites with content, search rankings & a website structure. I’m working on selling commercial-loans-source.com now… had a couple of offers, but I’m looking to get $30k for it (all a broker needs is a couple deals off the site to break even).
Domain names are a key component to a web presence. Domain names convert the numerical format that computers use to identify a website into a text based name that is easy for human users to understand and recall.