news Why some companies spend $1 Million on a domain name

[News]

One of the greatest benefits of acquiring an ultra-premium domain in the seven-figure and up category is the instant credibility and trust that comes with the acquisition.

Not only are premium domain names better drivers of new customer leads and inquiries, but they tend to be easier to market and gain traction in search engine results due to the higher amount of trust placed in them by the search engines, due to their age, traffic and link profile.

Domain names like this generally continue to gain in value over time as fewer domain names become available—and as more prospective buyers enter the fray...

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[Mister Funsky]

From the article:

• Age of the domain—older is always better.

• Does the domain have a .com extension?

• What is the existing traffic of the domain?

• What is the SEO and link profile of the domain?

• Does the domain name fit your brand, service, product or niche?

 

[bmugford]

From the article:

• Age of the domain—older is always better.

That point is certainly debatable.

While older domains tend to be higher quality in general, there are plenty of bad old domains.

If a super premium domain dropped tomorrow I don't think it would really be any less valuable.

Brad

 

[Mister Funsky]

That point is certainly debatable.

While older domains tend to be higher quality in general, there are plenty of bad old domains.

If a super premium domain dropped tomorrow I don't think it would really be any less valuable.

Brad

I agree.

Admittedly, there was a time I felt age was top tier as far as a 'must have' would be. One of my biggest sales was a name that had been dropped...that opened my eyes to looking at age as one of many things to consider.

(sadly, I have quite a few elderly 'bad old names'!)

 

[DomainRecap]

The key questions of any very expensive domain acquisition:

1) Does it exactly match your core brand? i.e. Cardinal Publishing = Cardinal or Aura Cosmetics = Aura, etc.

2) Is it a .COM, and if not, is it your country's ccTLD or even a prominent alt-TLD like .AI or .CO.

Everything else is just BS as a company looking to acquire their core brand for millions of dollars isn't paying all that money for SEO, an early first date of registration, traffic stats, or link profiles.

They want to own the online landscape under that specific core brand.

 

[Hypersot]

I have yet to find an article, post, blog, etc. explaining in solid facts why age matters to a domain's value. Everyone seems to claim age matters but no-one actually explains why.

Saying age matters because the longer a domain is registered, the better, is not a fact btw. it's a claim.

 

[pb]

I have yet to find an article, post, blog, etc. explaining in solid facts why age matters to a domain's value. Everyone seems to claim age matters but no-one actually explains why.

Saying age matters because the longer a domain is registered, the better, is not a fact btw. it's a claim.

I think it comes from the notion that the best domains are already taken. If it drops and is caught, the registration date might be reset but the domain is still "old" in the sense it was first registered 20-30 years ago.

We all know that new stuff is introduced all the time and a great exact-match domain registered today might be worth big money in a year or two. However if you look exclusively at great dictionary domains that can readily be applied to a brand, the pool is indeed very limited and long depleted.

 

[Hypersot]

@pb ,
I understand what you are saying but that is irrelevant to the age.

This 'age' thing creates a misconception that 'age' is a solid metric that can justify a higher price which is not true. You will see countless newcomers to the industry buying domains just because of their age and then wonder why no-one buys them (unless ofc they happen to stumble upon another 'believer' who would buy that crap).

So, while what you say is absolutely true, it doesn't address the issue that there are some people out there that probably benefit from this misconception.

 

[Eric Lyon]

From the article:

• Age of the domain—older is always better.

I have yet to find an article, post, blog, etc. explaining in solid facts why age matters to a domain's value. Everyone seems to claim age matters but no-one actually explains why.

Saying age matters because the longer a domain is registered, the better, is not a fact btw. it's a claim.

Just to touch briefly on the above without taking the attention away from some of the other value metrics they mentioned, here's my thoughts on age:

• Older domains generally have had more time to obtain authority (More if previously developed)
• Older domains generally have an easier time getting better index spots in search engines (More if previously developed)
• Older domains generally have an easier time getting better rankings (Especially if previously developed)
• Older domains generally provide resellers with a back-pay reference to justify some pricing costs (E.g. renewal costs over the years) to prospective buyers
• Older domains generally provide history that can be leveraged to establish value through previous development(s) (Especially if the backlink profile has high-quality referring site links)
• Older domains generally come with a potential consumer leads source if the brand was well known already, leading to consistent type-in traffic, even after acquisition from the previous customer base
• Older domains generally come with various types of other traffic as well (Backlinks, old banner ads that were never removed, old marketing articles and blog post references, olds PR campaigns still indexed, Old videos that reference the brand and still being watched, etc..) - (The better the previous brand, the more valuable this variable potentially becomes)

However, the above does little for a domain name if a bad actor that acquired the asset prior to you (Or the next person) used the domain for scams, spam, blackhat SEO/SEM, etc.. As that smears the potential of the asset in a bad way and can be leveraged by a good acquisitions team to devalue the asset substantially since they would need to clean it up prior to launching a trusted and authoritative brand on it.

It's even worse for a new brand if all the associated emails to the domain are still blacklisted on all the big eMail providers servers due to unethical mass spam campaigns. It means they can not communicate effectively with customers in need of support, wouldn't be able to launch a successful marketing campaign, a subscribed newsletter wouldn't reach the subscribers, etc..

Helpful information about spam scores:

• This guide from MOZ can help walk you through some stuff regarding spam scores: https://moz.com/help/link-explorer/link-building/spam-score
• This one provides a checklist to reduce high spam scores: https://www.copernica.com/en/documentation/some-tips-to-lower-your-email-spam-score
• This one will help with email blacklists: https://uptime.com/blog/domain-blac...:text=If your site is on,to ask to be removed.

A previously documented lawsuit, bankruptcy, etc.. can also effect the value of a domain asset with an associated main-stream brand.

The above is just the stuff off the top of my head (Without spending too much time on it). There's lot's more variables that add and subtract value from a domain in relation to it's age. Though, the above should at least give a basic idea to build off of in your continued research.

In short, age is a 50/50 double-edged sword that can sway either way based on it's history and the ethics surrounding the assets previous brand developments.

At the end of the day, a domain is truly only worth what a buyer and seller agree on.

That's just my opinion, of course and we all have different opinions. We each evaluate and do things differently.

 

[Hypersot]

@Eric Lyon ,
what you mention is not older *domains* you refer to older *websites* . If you get a domain name and keep it without any content for years, it won't rank 'easier' nor achieve any backlinks, in fact G will probably de-index it since it will have no content.

And, please, this is not a topic about age. Providing a wall of text with facts is unnecessary. You could just have pointed out a few things about it, just a few bullet points would have suffice to help me understand and do my own research if needed.

 

[Eric Lyon]

@Eric Lyon ,
what you mention is not older *domains* you refer to older *websites* . If you get a domain name and keep it without any content for years, it won't rank 'easier' nor achieve any backlinks, in fact G will probably de-index it since it will have no content.

And, please, this is not a topic about age. Providing a wall of text with facts is unnecessary. You could just have pointed out a few things about it, just a few bullet points would have suffice to help me understand and do my own research if needed.

Keep in mind, the article does not specify if the domain was parked, landed, or previously developed. They left that wide open to speculation in a very general sense. I merely provided some insight to help digest different potential variables that may or may not play a role in the age value metric.

Additionally, some landing/parked pages these days are getting indexed, do have a backlink profile, and many have previous history that the current owners (resellers) may not be aware of, but could benefit from in knowing.

A quick check over at the WayBackMachine can shed lots of light on a parked/landed domain: https://web.archive.org/

Some might be surprised to find out that their aged domain they owned for 5 of 26 years was actually a popular brand in a different part of the world 15 years prior to their acquisition of it. Some of that information can be leveraged for value, whilst the rest might be a devaluing metric.

Again, to each their own. we all evaluate and do it differently.

Just figured some people might be able to benefit from the information I've provided as a starting point to their own research.

 

[Kyle Tully]

I have yet to find an article, post, blog, etc. explaining in solid facts why age matters to a domain's value. Everyone seems to claim age matters but no-one actually explains why.

Saying age matters because the longer a domain is registered, the better, is not a fact btw. it's a claim.

It’s the simple fact that better domains were secured earlier.

It doesn’t mean an older name is definitely better than a newer one. It’s just one factor to consider.

But the odds that a domain registered before 2000 is better than one first registered in 2024 are pretty high.

 

[DomainNature]

The age of a domain is just one check box out of 8 or more.
imo

 

[Chris Hydrick]

Cool headline, but I stopped reading the article after seeing the authors name.

To me it reads:

Why would a company spend $1 million on a domain name? Because the company didn't know their domain broker was charging them $500,000 in commission fees.

https://www.namepros.com/threads/vpn-com-llc-has-filed-a-multimillion-lawsuit.1279551/#post-8663162

After several rounds of negotiation with Dikian, Dikian agreed on an acquisition price of $2,250,000 net to Dikian. After several rounds of negotiation with Du, Du agreed on an acquisition price of $4,400,000 to be paid by Du. VPN’s net proceeds for brokering the deal would be $2,150,000.

 

[equity78]

Cool headline, but I stopped reading the article after seeing the authors name.

Show attachment 255529

To me it reads:

Why would a company spend $1 million on a domain name? Because the company didn't know their domain broker was charging them $500,000 in commission fees.

https://www.namepros.com/threads/vpn-com-llc-has-filed-a-multimillion-lawsuit.1279551/#post-8663162

Oh man Chris, that was great. I swear to you I have not checked Forbes for about a week so when I saw the headline here, I clicked the post here, (still have not read the article). But when I put the cursor over read more and it said Forbes, I said out loud which domain broker wrote this? Saw or VPN.com? I knew just by the title a domain broker who publishes on Forbes wrote the piece.

 

[DNAAS]

Google’s John Mueller has said previously that
1. Age doesn’t matter - the SEO does
2. Spam is ignored by Google unless it’s on a massive scale.

 

[pb]

Spam is ignored by Google unless it’s on a massive scale.

Can you elaborate? I only ever pay attention to the name, but I sometimes have prospective buyers write something like "I will pay less because the domain is spammed in google so we will have to spend time/money to clean it".

 

[DNAAS]

https://www.searchenginejournal.com...elp-with-spammy-foreign-language-hack/505331/

https://www.searchenginejournal.com...s-negative-seo-link-disavow-companies/478348/

John: “Don’t waste your time on it; do things that build up your site instead.”
it meaning disavow and removal of spam links

 

[DNAAS]

I have personal sites that have DA 50's PA 50's SS 0 with backlinks and content

PS
DA is a useless measure but everyone likes it
TF is a much better measure
Pagerank is ok but again very different to what Google uses.
Google rankings for keywords is really the only true measure of a website.

Remember a domain has no SEO value - it is the underlying website

 

[DNAAS]

Can you elaborate? I only ever pay attention to the name, but I sometimes have prospective buyers write something like "I will pay less because the domain is spammed in google so we will have to spend time/money to clean it".

If someone says that they either are just using it as a negotiating tactic or have no idea about SEO

 

[DomainChat.net]

Why some companies spend $1 Million on a domain name​

Because they have the money.

So they can do whatever they want with their money, including investing on domain names

 

[namegulf]

Why some companies spend $1 Million on a domain name​

Because they have the money.

So they can do whatever they want with their money, including investing on domain names

Unfortunately it's not that simple. CFO's are number guys, it takes a lot for a CMO (or anybody who owns marketing) to convince the rest of the leadership to shell out that dollars. Marketing is also on the hook for the ROI.

 

[Chris Hydrick]

Why spend $15 million buying Chat.com?

Because:

- it was better than hand registering 1.5 million GPT .coms :-]