One of our most popular topics on NamePros Blog is the regular sales updates from Mike Mann. Our articles about his sales figures regularly attract a lot of discussion, and also a lot of speculation as to how much money Mike makes from domain names.
For those who aren’t familiar, Mike Mann is an extremely accomplished domain investor and has founded three Inc 500 companies - SEO.com, Phone.com and DomainMarket.com. He was also the founder of BuyDomains.com, a company which was partly responsible for the legitimization of domain trading. Mike sold BuyDomains in 2005 to Highland Capital for about $80 million.
Alongside operating companies such as SEO.com, Phone.com and DomainMarket.com, Mike also helps operate two great charities: Grassroots.org and ChangeTheWorld.org.
DomainMarket.com is the domain sales platform, from which Mike and his team sell premium domain names to entrepreneurs, businesses, and nonprofits looking for top-quality names to improve their online brand. Mike gave me a few minutes of his time to discuss some of the key points of DomainMarket.com, along with his thoughts on new gTLDs.
Firstly, I wanted to ask Mike how many domain names he owns. As of July 2015, Mike owns an estimated 250,000 domain names, which are listed at DomainMarket.com. Some of his domain names include HappyBirthday.com, Obey.com, Cameroon.com, Aux.com and Tasty.com. For those who are interested, yes, Mike’s annual domain renewal fee is around $8 per domain name.
Whilst Mike owns a very large portfolio of domains, he confirmed to me that he isn’t acquiring new domain names every week. He didn’t elaborate on this, but one could assume that Mike and his staff are concentrating on the domains that he already owns, which became apparent when I asked him whether DomainMarket.com conducted any outbound sales.
The answer to this is yes, DomainMarket.com has “just started practicing outbound sales” - a type of sales marketing in which you actively seek a domain name buyer instead of waiting for inbound inquiries.
These outbound marketing efforts from DomainMarket.com means that Mike sells an average of seven domain names per day. Of course, not all of these deals are publicized, but Mike does update his Facebook and Twitter accounts with important domain sales when he can. For example, last week he posted three domain name sales totaling $32,500 from domains he’d acquired for a total of $157.50.
I also asked Mike about his average purchase price and average sales price, but this information is confidential. The average sales price from the publicly available data that Mike Mann releases via Twitter is $19,839 whilst the average purchase price is $270.59. Of course, this data cannot be an exact representation of Mike’s domain sales record due to the fact that this is a very small sample of data compared to the company’s daily and weekly averages.
No domain discussion is complete these days without a comment on the new gTLD program. I asked Mike whether he had invested in new gTLDs, and his answer was a simple “No”. I took the TLD discussion a step further by asking whether he thinks that any new gTLD could take the mantle from
Another interesting piece of information from my chat with Mike is that he is looking to start a new domain name company. Without giving any details on the type of company (perhaps a parking platform or a sales marketplace), he did say that he has a plan and is seeking investment capital.
His latest venture is Cashless.com, a company to help merchants accelerate profits by installing simple cashless payment systems. With Mike’s history of app development and interactive marketing within his other companies (SEO.com LLC, DomainMarket.com LLC, and Phone.com Inc), you can bet that this is a company you’ll hear more about in the future.
For those who aren’t familiar, Mike Mann is an extremely accomplished domain investor and has founded three Inc 500 companies - SEO.com, Phone.com and DomainMarket.com. He was also the founder of BuyDomains.com, a company which was partly responsible for the legitimization of domain trading. Mike sold BuyDomains in 2005 to Highland Capital for about $80 million.
Alongside operating companies such as SEO.com, Phone.com and DomainMarket.com, Mike also helps operate two great charities: Grassroots.org and ChangeTheWorld.org.
DomainMarket.com is the domain sales platform, from which Mike and his team sell premium domain names to entrepreneurs, businesses, and nonprofits looking for top-quality names to improve their online brand. Mike gave me a few minutes of his time to discuss some of the key points of DomainMarket.com, along with his thoughts on new gTLDs.
Firstly, I wanted to ask Mike how many domain names he owns. As of July 2015, Mike owns an estimated 250,000 domain names, which are listed at DomainMarket.com. Some of his domain names include HappyBirthday.com, Obey.com, Cameroon.com, Aux.com and Tasty.com. For those who are interested, yes, Mike’s annual domain renewal fee is around $8 per domain name.
Whilst Mike owns a very large portfolio of domains, he confirmed to me that he isn’t acquiring new domain names every week. He didn’t elaborate on this, but one could assume that Mike and his staff are concentrating on the domains that he already owns, which became apparent when I asked him whether DomainMarket.com conducted any outbound sales.
The answer to this is yes, DomainMarket.com has “just started practicing outbound sales” - a type of sales marketing in which you actively seek a domain name buyer instead of waiting for inbound inquiries.
These outbound marketing efforts from DomainMarket.com means that Mike sells an average of seven domain names per day. Of course, not all of these deals are publicized, but Mike does update his Facebook and Twitter accounts with important domain sales when he can. For example, last week he posted three domain name sales totaling $32,500 from domains he’d acquired for a total of $157.50.
I also asked Mike about his average purchase price and average sales price, but this information is confidential. The average sales price from the publicly available data that Mike Mann releases via Twitter is $19,839 whilst the average purchase price is $270.59. Of course, this data cannot be an exact representation of Mike’s domain sales record due to the fact that this is a very small sample of data compared to the company’s daily and weekly averages.
No domain discussion is complete these days without a comment on the new gTLD program. I asked Mike whether he had invested in new gTLDs, and his answer was a simple “No”. I took the TLD discussion a step further by asking whether he thinks that any new gTLD could take the mantle from
.com and become the standard for domain name suffixes. His response was short and sweet: “They are lame; none will take over.”Another interesting piece of information from my chat with Mike is that he is looking to start a new domain name company. Without giving any details on the type of company (perhaps a parking platform or a sales marketplace), he did say that he has a plan and is seeking investment capital.
His latest venture is Cashless.com, a company to help merchants accelerate profits by installing simple cashless payment systems. With Mike’s history of app development and interactive marketing within his other companies (SEO.com LLC, DomainMarket.com LLC, and Phone.com Inc), you can bet that this is a company you’ll hear more about in the future.
