Dynadot

information Taking A Close Look At Domain Name Appraisals

NameSilo
Few topics generate as much heat as discussion of automated domain name appraisals. The value of human appraisals can also be controversial. This week I decided to take a look at appraisal options and limitations. Should we even be doing domain name appraisals?

Why Do You Want An Appraisal?

The first question to ask is why do you want an appraisal? The following are some possible answers.
  1. I am new to domain investing, and want to know if I am on the right track.
  2. I need help deciding which names I should keep or liquidate.
  3. I am unsure about pricing this domain name.
  4. I hope to learn new ideas about possible uses for this domain name.
  5. I want an appraisal that I can eventually use to make my case when negotiating with a buyer.
  6. I am looking for confirmation that what I think is right.
  7. I want to know appraisal data that may be in the hands of potential buyers.
The reason(s) you want a domain name appraisal will influence the type of appraisal that might be helpful.

Types Of Appraisals

There are several types of domain name appraisals possible.
  • You can post your domain name for appraisal right here on NamePros, and others will respond with appraisals. This is an example of a crowd-sourced domain name appraisals. Social media, and domain name investor gatherings, offer additional appraisal opportunities.
  • Some marketplaces, as well as certain podcasts and dedicated appraisal services, will produce an expert domain name appraisal, often for a fee. I call these appraisals expert, not meaning they are necessarily better than crowd-sourced, or even automated, appraisals, but because the appraiser is claiming to have particular expertise. The appraisal may be the view of one expert, or from a panel.
  • Several of the brandable marketplaces suggest a price for accepted domain names. This is not unlike the expert appraisals mentioned above, except that the appraisal cost is usually minimal.
  • Another option is an automated appraisal, in which an algorithm, or possibly artificial intelligence, is used to produce both a suggested valuation, as well as other information such as comparator sales or advertiser statistics. The best known of these are Estibot, the GoDaddy appraisal, and NameWorth. Other valuation products are mainly geared to evaluating website worth, as opposed to just the domain name, looking at SEO aspects.
  • Another option is a personal domain appraisal. For example, you and another domain investor might agree to privately appraise each other’s domain names. While this is just one person’s view, it has the advantage that there is not a direct cost, and the results are private, unlike crowd-sourced appraisals.
  • Last, but not least, a rigorous domain name self-appraisal, using some valuation metric or checklist, could be done by the owner. This has the advantage that you know exactly what went into the appraisal, including any assumptions. These free research tools can help you get started.
Probably many of us have used one or more of these types of appraisals, perhaps without thinking of it as an appraisal.

Avoid The Domain Appraisal Scam

A common scam that has been present for many years is to tell a domain investor that a domain name has sold for a large amount, but the buyer requires you to provide a domain certificate before the sale can complete. That process requires the investor to first buy an appraisal to prove the worth of the domain name. After the investor pays for the certificate, the buyer disappears, as the goal was always just to get money from the investor. While independent appraisals are, in principle, not unreasonable, and widely used in the real estate world, don’t fall for this scam.

Estibot

The oldest of the popular automated domain appraisal options is Estibot, which is used for about 2 million valuations per day. Estibot provides appraisals for all extensions, although the valuations will be nominal for newly released extensions.

One can do 2 free Estibot appraisals per day without an account, or sign up for an Estibot account to increase that limit and also get additional features. The Novice Plan allow you to do up to 150 lookups per day, and also adds Domain Flipping and Portfolio Monitoring tools. There is no contract or requirement for a minimum commitment at Estibot.

Portfolio Monitoring, one service with the Estibot plans, can be valuable. It monitors similar registrations, trademarks or domain names that have gone into development, among other things such as changes in algorithm valuation for the domain name.

The Estibot lead generator helps to identify potential end-user buyers for the domain name. You can get a rundown of the many Estibot tools on this page.

The Intermediate Plan adds expiring domain data, while the Advanced Plan includes API access. You can do 5000 lookups per day on the Advanced Plan, and 500 on the Intermediate Plan.

Even the free Estibot appraisals provide analytics information. For example, you can see exact and broad search data including volume and and cost-per-click (CPC). The output shows how the CPC data has changed over the past year. While there are other ways to access such data, I find Estibot an easy to use presentation.

While Estibot does list comparable domain sales, I personally don’t find Estibot comparator sale data very helpful most of the time. It seems to list sales very similar in price to the appraised value, independent of whether the name was in a similar sector.

The free version of Estbot shows whether the term is registered in the major legacy extensions plus .info, .biz and .us. One can, of course, get more complete information on this using tools like dotDB.

One thing to watch with Estibot is how the term was broken down, and whether for new extensions they included the extension in the search. Fortunately this is shown in the display.

Estibot, in my opinion, does not handle made-up brandable domain names well, usually suggesting low values. This is because such names will not have advertiser search data or registrations in other extensions.

Some registrars and marketplaces give Estibot valuations in listings, so I think it is important as an investor to know the Estibot value, even if you do not plan to directly use the appraisal information.

GoDaddy Valuation Tool

A few years ago GoDaddy introduced a free domain name valuation tool, which will evaluate any domain name, and it is free to use. They seem to have some limit if you do many valuations in a short time, but after refreshing the site it will let you do more. Because of their huge user base, and the visibility of the domain appraisal service, many millions of valuations are done each day. After they started the service, GoDaddy reported that there was an uptick on leads becoming sales on their platforms.

A GoDaddy appraisal is free and easy to do - just enter the name and press return. As well as suggesting a valuation for the domain name, it has a statement regarding the value of the individual terms in a multiple word domain name. In my experience, GoDaddy does a superb job splitting up multiple word domain names.

It also, in my opinion, is excellent at suggesting comparator sales. Since they have the huge dataset of Afternic and GoDaddy sales, there are numerous comparator sales that are not in the NameBio database. Note that there are additional comparator sales further down the results page, not just the several shown at the top.

The one weakness, though, is they do not provide the year of the sale. An exact match name that sold 15 years ago might not be very relevant now, due to changes in brand choices and Google search over the years.

When the GoDaddy appraisal tool was in beta development, they seemed to be making significant changes almost every week. It was not unusual to see huge fluctuations, sometimes by a factor of 2, in the appraised prices. Lately, however, the prices seem more stable. Clearly valuations should change with time, but slowly.

While the GoDaddy appraisal will handle any extension, even those that GoDaddy the registrar does not handle, with new extensions they do not seem to give proper attention to the match across the dot. For example, just now I checked and investment.fund and investment.dog each have identical valuations of $2155. I think most investors would consider the former more valuable than the latter.

For two-word domain names in legacy extensions, I think Go Daddy appraisal is strong as a technique for ordering probable value. That is, if I check 4 domain names, and the appraisals come back at $500, $1200, $1400, and $4500, most of the times I agree that the $4500 name has highest worth. A number of Requests on NamePros specify some minimum GoDaddy appraisal value.

It seems to me that increasing numbers of potential end users are checking GoDaddy appraisal values before a purchase. This can help if you are pricing below the valuation, or even near it, but obviously can be an obstacle if your pricing is much higher. In any case, it is important to know the value in case it does come up.

NameWorth

There is now a third significant automated appraisal system, NameWorth. While you need to sign up for a NameWorth account to do valuations, you can conduct up to 5 valuations per day on the free account, up to a maximum of 20 per month. They also have paid plans that include bulk upload and API access, in addition to more lookups.

NameWorth currently only evaluate .com domain names, although there is mention of adding .net at some point. Generally, but not always, you will find valuations higher on NameWorth than on GoDaddy valuator and Estibot.

One of the things I really like about NameWorth is they give 6 prices for each domain name, with corresponding probability of sale within a defined period for each. The top price, their trademarked Retail Level, is the price if the buyer approaches you to acquire this specific name for immediate business use with few or no alternative names. The Market Level (trademarked term) might correspond to a user browsing a marketplace for a name, and considering this name as one of several options. There is an Auction Level corresponding to the wholesale price if the name was placed in a 7 day auction. For each price, they state the probability of sale.

NameWorth also gives a demand rating for the domain name, looking at similar names that are developed or used in blogs, along with registrations of similar names. If you use their associated marketplace, BIIX, the NameWorth valuation can show on your lander.

Domain Appraisal Is Hard

While it is natural to be critical of both automated and human appraisals, and indeed sometimes they are very wrong, we should acknowledge that domain appraisal is not easy. The retail price depends on more than the name itself. An investor who does not need funding from domain investing, and is willing to wait many years, and is an expert negotiator, will secure a much higher price than an investor who needs to draw living expenses from a steady stream of domain sales.

Some types of names, such as 4 letter or short numeric, are easier to appraise because there is a wealth of sales data available and the structure is relatively straightforward. On the other hand, an appraisal of a newly released extension, or a thinly-traded country code, does not have that information.

Appraisal of single word domain names should be easy, but because the elite names trade so infrequently, and the role of the negotiator may be crucial in these sales, in practice this is not always the case.

Made-up brandable terms are among the most challenging to appraise, as each is unique and it is not easy to establish close comparators. Those who have sold many brandable names, such as the brandable marketplaces and highly successful investors in that niche, are probably in the best position to evaluate these.

Treat An Appraisal As A Second Opinion

There is little doubt that over-dependance on automated appraisals has hurt some early-stage domain investors. I think there is danger in depending too much on any one measure, whether that is number of extensions, age of domain, or automated appraisal. Therefore, view automated appraisals, or I would argue any appraisals, as a second opinion.

First do a detailed analysis, looking at things like business use, comparator sales, and alternative names, and decide on your own a price range for the domain name. If the appraised value is much higher, or lower, perhaps take a second look, but don’t give it more importance than that. Consider getting a fellow investor, or a site like NamePros, to give you a additional opinions as well.

It’s Not Only About The Price

Interpreting an automated appraisal should not be mainly about the price. Use Estibot as an easy way to get SEO statistics, or GoDaddy valuator as a source of additional comparator sales. Use a NamePros appraisal, or one from a friend, to help you with relative worth, and to suggest possible users for a name.

I think it is unfortunate that the automated appraisals, except for NameWorth, do not give a price range. If GoDaddy valuator, instead of saying that the worth was $1411, said it was in the range $500 to $2500, the appraisal would be sounder. The model NameWorth use, of different prices corresponding to different potential buyers, makes a lot of sense to me.

When using an automated appraisal keep in mind the approach and biases inherent in the appraisal. For example, Estibot take into account search volume and costs per click, which is not relevant for a made-up brandable term. Remember that GoDaddy appraisal for new extensions takes little account of match across the dot, so you must interpret results with that in mind.

I think ultimately automated appraisals could get much better through more sophisticated artificial intelligence, and in particular machine learning.

It is human nature that many people think their own domain names are more valuable than they really are. An appraisal can be a valuable reality check on the true worth of domains in our portfolio. That said, keep in mind appraisals can sometimes be very wrong.

Stay Tuned

Originally, I had planned this article to also cover how to optimize appraisals here on NamePros, with recommendations both for those requesting appraisals and those responding to the request. Given the length of this article, I decided to split that topic, and will be publishing it in a week or two on the NamePros Blog.


I welcome your comments on domain appraisals.
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
The only thing that can give you a close picture of a domain value are previous similar sales, that's a fact,
Not wanting to be provocative, but surely that can't be always true. What about a new technology? By definition no prior sales. I think that prior sales, to the degree we know them and there are some reported, are an important criteria but not the only criteria. I think focus on any single criteria, including prior sales or automated appraisals, is problematic.

What if my main purpose to buy a domain name is to improve traffic via SEO. Surely there are considerations other than whether a similar domain name sold for a lot that enter into how much I would pay for the domain name, such as search volumes and how much I would have to pay to purchase equivalent advertising.

By definition most made up brandables do not have prior sales (agree sometimes similar) but daily there are many of them selling at $$$$ to $$$$$ and occasionally more.

If domain appraising could get more accurate, and as noted with AI I think it is possible, then end users would have more confidence that they were getting reasonable value. Many businesses and organizations require some third party indication that amounts to be spent on major items are reasonable. I don't think we have that currently. More accurate appraisals, whether by experts, panels or machine learning bots, would move things forward. It is also crucial for domains as an asset class to take off with fractional ownership.

The probable value of a name will also depend on competitive valuations. Let's say I have a great name in the .co extension. But the same term is offered in the .com and .io for just high $$$. That drags down the price I am likely to get. The converse is true if the .com will never be on market and the .io is priced at $75,000.

Sorry to be argumentative. But needed to say what I believe. And that is that many factors are important, sometimes critically so.

Bob
 
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Last year BIIX did some promo, had good feedback and I liked what they were doing a lot. For a few months there was good support. However as time went by they became slower and recently there's been no support at all with no replies to direct emails or support tickets sent via BIIX platform. Sadly I have no other option but to stop using them which is unfortunate because biix appeared to be so good and promising before. I also am wondering if they are still in business?

P.S. It also appears biix.com site has not been updated in a very long time, if at all.

Same experience here. It's simply nobody there at support for a few months. And I tried to contact them on several occasions, including recent problem to upgrade to higher membership level (which I never did at the end due to non-responce). Also back in November I was trying to contact the owner thru LinkedIn - same, no reply, althrough he accepted the invitation. I don't think someone there is ''actively behind'' now, it's seems like this platform is run by inertia...
 
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The appraisals don't have to be exactly the same, but if they are close enough they tend to give us some reassurance that although different systems might have been used, but they all have managed to arrive at a logical dollar value that makes sense.

The only thing that can give you a close picture of a domain value are previous similar sales

Close enough? Previous sales? Based upon what? Inter-domainer sales? End user sales? Auction sales? All sales mixed up as reported by NameBio? What proportion of end user sales get reported? We can't even agree on that.

You are each attempting to compare apples with oranges. Those are no comparisons at all. Aftermarket domains are used goods. Like eBay, arts markets, car boot sales, house auctions, etc etc, you'll get a good price one day, a bad price the next.

Who put estate agent and trust in the same sentence??? (That's a joke). Truly, though, realtors/estate agents have a single method for assessing house prices. We don't. The truth is, You don't like my method and I don't like yours (generality, not specifically you the person looking at this and me writing it).
 
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Not wanting to be provocative, but surely that can't be always true. What about a new technology? By definition no prior sales. I think that prior sales, to the degree we know them and there are some reported, are an important criteria but not the only criteria. I think focus on any single criteria, including prior sales or automated appraisals, is problematic.

What if my main purpose to buy a domain name is to improve traffic via SEO. Surely there are considerations other than whether a similar domain name sold for a lot that enter into how much I would pay for the domain name, such as search volumes and how much I would have to pay to purchase equivalent advertising.

By definition most made up brandables do not have prior sales (agree sometimes similar) but daily there are many of them selling at $$$$ to $$$$$ and occasionally more.

If domain appraising could get more accurate, and as noted with AI I think it is possible, then end users would have more confidence that they were getting reasonable value. Many businesses and organizations require some third party indication that amounts to be spent on major items are reasonable. I don't think we have that currently. More accurate appraisals, whether by experts, panels or machine learning bots, would move things forward. It is also crucial for domains as an asset class to take off with fractional ownership.

The probable value of a name will also depend on competitive valuations. Let's say I have a great name in the .co extension. But the same term is offered in the .com and .io for just high $$$. That drags down the price I am likely to get. The converse is true if the .com will never be on market and the .io is priced at $75,000.

Sorry to be argumentative. But needed to say what I believe. And that is that many factors are important, sometimes critically so.

Bob
Hi Bob. When I say "The only thing that can give you a close picture of a domain value are previous similar sales, that's a fact," I mean previous similar sales with those keywords.

What about a new technology? By definition no prior sales.
That would be obviously an exception, Bob.

By definition most made up brandables do not have prior sales
And that's another exception. You can virtually ask from $1 to $10K or whatever for a brandable or invented word. It if sounds good to the buyer and he is willing to pay whatever for that invented word, that's up to him.

The probable value of a name will also depend on competitive valuations.
I also don't want to be provocative here, but I totally disagree with that. In fact, the only valuation of a domain value if that of its owner.
No external valuation will say for what I am going to sell my domain. But that's the aim of the automated valuations, to make you believe that's the value of your domain.

If domain appraising could get more accurate, and as noted with AI I think it is possible, then end users would have more confidence that they were getting reasonable value.
If that would be true and we had to believe on domain appraisals, Mr. Schwartz would have never sold a domain over $10k, never ever.
Many businesses and organizations require some third party indication that amounts to be spent on major items are reasonable.
Sure, and their third party indication will tell them that your domain is worth $10 bucks. Again, if I had to believe on the buyer's valuation of my domain names, I would never have sold them over $100.
 
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It is also crucial for domains as an asset class to take off with fractional ownership.

Not necessarily so. I repeat, this is a used goods market. Like historical art, but it is also financial assets so very like the AIM shares market in this country and the early days of Nasdaq in the USA. I really don't think there will ever be a price consensus along with a thriving domainer level of activity. The biggest single reason is that we are not pricing for one market. The auctions and wholesale are generally inter-domainer. The end user is mostly unpublished and what is has to be priced by business/industrial sector and niche within each sector. Extremely complex. More so than being a supplier in a specific market. How can any team of "experts" or an algorithm accurately decide prices in that melee?

many factors are important, sometimes critically so.

A true, robust and long lasting fact.
 
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Previous similar sales based on the same keywords.

So are we talking auction, inter domainer (wholesale) or end user? I don't think your "similar sales" exist beyond your own imagination and the silly, impractical, comparisons the platforms suggest.
 
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So are we talking auction, inter domainer (wholesale) or end user? I don't think your "similar sales" exist beyond your own imagination and the silly, impractical, comparisons the platforms suggest.
Preferably and obviously, sales to end users. My own imagination does not place any sale report on Namebio or DNjournal, my mind is not so powerful, for the moment.

I prefer to check previously sales, than automated worthless bot appraisals.
 
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The problem with that approach, @Sutruk, is that you are assuming end user data when in actual fact the vast bulk of what NameBio publishes and we don't know what proportion by DNJournal are actually not end user sales. You are not making a case here. You are making my point.
 
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The problem with that approach, @Sutruk, is that you are assuming end user data when in actual fact the vast bulk of what NameBio publishes and we don't know what proportion by DNJournal are actually not end user sales. You are not making a case here. You are making my point.
Only check that list for end user sales, obviously. Do not check the auction sales because those don't count for end user sale requests.
Just go to Namebio, check for the keyword you are looking for, and then click on "Price" to order them from top to bottom. The top ones are typically sales to end users.
Another way to do it is selecting the report by "Venue". Only check end user marketplaces. Do not check Godaddy or Namejet, as they are usually auction sales at reseller price.
 
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I shan't be checking them for anything, @Sutruk. I don't believe they are more than marginally relevant, nor do I believe they are sufficiently accurate in sorting which are retail and which wholesale to be useful for productive purposes.
 
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I shan't be checking them for anything, @Sutruk. I don't believe they are more than marginally relevant, nor do I believe they are sufficiently accurate in sorting which are retail and which wholesale to be useful for productive purposes.
The ultimate word about the value of your domains is yours, and nobody else. And even less from an automated bot order. Value your domains as you think they are worth, that's all.
 
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The ultimate word about the value of your domains is yours, and nobody else. And even less from an automated bot order. Value your domains as you think they are worth, that's all.

It's true that you and only you can put a value on your domain, but at what point is the domaining community with their collective knowledge and experience is going to tell you that your prices are unreasonably high or that you are leaving money on the table by asking too little.

Assuming that AI is going to surpass the collective knowledge and experience of the domaining community soon ( if not already) then it's not unreasonable to assume that AI will consider not only the metrics and factors that are usually mentioned by the domaining community when it comes to domain valuations, but that it will have the ability to consider thousands or even millions (billions ?) of other metrics and factors that our minds and our simple robotic scripts can not handle and comprehend.

I like to see the day that AI can tell us exactly who might be interested in a certain domain name and how much is the maximum that they are willing or able to pay for it. :xf.wink:

IMO
 
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I like to see the day that AI can tell us exactly who might be interested in a certain domain name and how much is the maximum that they are willing or able to pay for it.

Let's take this one more level. AI will negotiate with other AI, at that time.
 
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Assuming that AI is going to surpass the collective knowledge

That is one huge assume, @oldtimer. AI's current capabilities are being grossly exaggerated. The expectations being built up of what it will be able to do are, in my view, utterly unrealistic. It can emulate smatterings of human activity and that will improve. But reflecting complex thought processes and true decision making? Dreamworld now and for a very long time to come.

Assuming your moniker reflects your age and especially if you are anywhere near my vintage, the two of us just ain't gonna see anything like that!!!
 
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That is one huge assume, @oldtimer. AI's current capabilities are being grossly exaggerated. The expectations being built up of what it will be able to do are, in my view, utterly unrealistic. It can emulate smatterings of human activity and that will improve. But reflecting complex thought processes and true decision making? Dreamworld now and for a very long time to come.

Assuming your moniker reflects your age and especially if you are anywhere near my vintage, the two of us just ain't gonna see anything like that!!!

You might be right as far as having a fully autonomous AI that has reached "General Intelligence" and gained "General Awareness" and that is capable of having "Independent Judgment".

But AI is being used by many big corporations and businesses as we speak and is gaining expertise in many different areas beyond that which humans have been able to achieve.

Keep in mind that our knowledge increases incrementally over a very long period of time and we all have to start from zero with every new generation,

But AI advances exponentially and is learning around the clock nonstop,

So things could happen a lot sooner than you might think. :xf.wink:

IMO
 
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Thanks for sharing, Sir.

It's really complicated to evaluate the value of domain names. Among the domain names I once sold, some of them sold for $50000. Before that, I was not so confident. But for buyers, they thought it's a very reasonable price. Though the value curve is sometimes not clear , generally accepted value standards always exist.
 
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Thanks Bob for the great writeup on the subject. Sorry I'm a few weeks late. I've been on here, but just haven't done a search for biix for some time.

Last year BIIX did some promo, had good feedback and I liked what they were doing a lot. For a few months there was good support. However as time went by they became slower and recently there's been no support at all with no replies to direct emails or support tickets sent via BIIX platform. Sadly I have no other option but to stop using them which is unfortunate because biix appeared to be so good and promising before. I also am wondering if they are still in business?

P.S. It also appears biix.com site has not been updated in a very long time, if at all.

For the record, biix was just Soft Launched in August of 2020, so I don't believe the reference that it "hasn't been updated in a very long time" could be factually true.

Today, we've also just released a White Label option. You can see some example sites at BetterNames.com & ProdigyDomains.com (test environment).

I think it's important to keep in mind the number and the type of support requests that I get regularly and that the site is still in "Beta Launch" mode. Because of such, I've had to prioritize inquiries and I may not have gotten to yours in a timely manner.

For example. I just spent over an hour this morning responding to 1 customer inquiry. This was an investor with 1000s of domains who is interested in listing them and he sent me an email today. The investor was also a "prior" NameWorth subscriber.

What I've had to do to keep up with emails and to keep things moving is group them into categories and prioritize them.

Taken Care of Within Hours:
  • Sales Related (biix Sales) - 100% are taken care of within hours
  • Refund related (refunds on NameWorth) - 95% are done on the same day
Taken Care of Within 24-48 Hours
  • Customers wanting to upgrade or downgrade (NameWorth) - 95% within 24-48 hours
  • Customers having a technical issue (uploading domains at biix, or something not working at NameWorth) - 90% within 24-48 hours
Taken Care of Within a Week
  • Advice requests for Sellers who are actively making sales on biix or current NameWorth customers - 90% within a week
Taken Care Within a Month or Longer
  • Open ended requests. I had one a few days back that said, "I have 5 domains I want to sell, how do I get them listed and sold". I'm all for helping new people, but you need to make some level of effort. Try to sign up for an account or try to add your domains first and then I'll be happy to help if you get stuck.
Likely Won't Get a Response
  • Requests for consultation. A couple weeks ago someone asked me to call them because they have 100 very valuable domains, which ended up being very mediocre. I'm really not interested in scheduling a call, interrupting whatever I have planned and talking on the phone about a custom plan for selling mediocre domains. I have nearly 8,000 domains of my own (many of them also mediocre), am trying to run 2 businesses and start up a 3rd so I'm somewhat short on time and I don't have the time to get on the phone whenever someone feels the whim to do so. They kept insisting we talk on the phone for their open ended session of inquiries, so I just ignored them eventually. Don't get me wrong, if a buyer wants to talk on the phone, I'll be on the phone within minutes or hours. But while I'm in a "beta" phase of releasing something, I'm not going to take a call like this. Mainly because I know it won't be the last call. This will just be the first of many requests from this customer.
  • Appraisal Confirmations from users that have no names listed at biix, and just a free account at NameWorth. For some customers who really need some direction, I've spent many hours sending detailed responses to all the various requests. But for those who aren't making an effort to sell on biix, or to spend some time looking at NameWorth results, my time has limits.
  • Repeated requests to fix something that doesn't fall in the current development timeline. If you have a good idea, I'll add it to the development queue and I appreciate that, but repeated requests for the same feature will end up getting your emails ignored. (unfortunately, I think yours fell here, even though the active request was for a support request regarding help uploading domains (mixed with a repeat request), so I apologize for that, but I had been accustomed to several of your emails before this being only about development efforts that were falling outside of my current efforts).
@namemarket the owner/developer of NameWorth has been tremendously busy on new developments for his tools at both Biix and NameWorth for a while now. I also wonder if he may be suffering from some illness because he has tended to disappear altogether for periods which have been a bit long for comfort.

I think it was the first time I checked out completely (almost completely) and it might not have been best thing to do for those that contacted me, but no deals were lost and 2020 really sucked so I needed some time. I know some claim 2020 wasn't that bad, but if DNJournal starts publishing every 2 weeks instead of every week, I think it's safe to say that many of us were affected. The good news is I've been back and I'm ready to do some more big things.

@Bob Hawkes thanks for another great article. Regarding the GoDaddy appraisals: it is often very difficult indeed to see what similarities, if any, exist between the domain it "appraises" and the domains it lists as comparators.

A huge problem with GoDaddy's appraisals is that prices are taken from its own sales records, to add to the fact that no sales dates are given for the comparators. They are mostly to domainers, in fact they are the vast majority. Hence they can only be regarded as wholesale prices. This is really rubbed in when you ask the price they will sell you a domain at. It is inevitably far higher, sometimes a multiple, of the appraisal it has just given you. Best used as a baseline for the event you are forced to sell. Don't go below it.

Finally, a note for @oldtimer, the day appraisals begin to converge it will be a sure sign the corporations are taking over the game entirely. People will be responding to expensive advertising campaigns and pricing will be set by algorithms and agreed by corporate cabals. We won't be able to compete. It won't be long after that there is no place for us in domaining other than on the narrow periphery of the business. If you don't have very deep pockets by then you'll be out.

Edit: I just put a couple of names through Estibot. The "valuations" were risible. These were names with dictionary words in English. The "comparator" names were random letters in both cases. I agree with most of the people who appear on DomainSherpa.com - Estibot estimates are a joke. Some minimal SEO information, but would any of it be relevant to an end user buyer's business? Questionable at best.



Thanks for the support and for the concern. Admittedly, after the great year that 2020 was (sarcasm), I took about 6-10 weeks off in early 2021 and purposely didn't care about anything and just reflected on things. If a sale came through I would get to it the same day, or if a refund request came through, I'd try to get to it within a day (wasn't always successful). So if you wrote to me some time between January and February, you may have been disappointed.

My time off was somewhat like this scene in Office Space.



If you get an appraisal on a house from several different experts in the real estate Industry and one says that the house is worth 500k and another one values the same house at 100k you tend not to trust any of them, but if the appraisals for the house from different companies are close enough it makes it easier for you to believe in them and that does not mean that all the experts are in collusion, it simply means that they all know their business and have arrived at a logical value for the house (or very close to it).

I think I talked to you about this via email sometime in March (or before), but you'll never get 3-4 companies to come anywhere close to agreeing on the price of domains. For many years, and probably now, KBB was the leader in car values. There were other guides out there, but no one used them.

As far as comparing NameWorth to other services, I'm going to have a biased opinion when talking about any other appraisal service. The reason for that is because I started NameWorth after being a domain investor for over 15 years and realizing that no appraisal services worked. I never used them and despised them like many domain investors.

The reason I didn't like appraisal services was because I would typically sell domains at 2-100 times higher than appraisal services were stating. Below are my sales via lease with the estibot estimates next to each sale. There are only 2 estimates that were in my favor out of 19! That is an accuracy of 10.5%. The other 89.5% of the time it would have lost large amounts of money for me. The biggest offenders were fluux.com which I sold via lease (below) for $15,000 in 2019, while the estibot value is $70, and PlanToGrow.com which I sold in March 2020 for $24,500, which estibot originally priced at $400, but now they've changed it to $25k after-the-fact.

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So my plan isn't to come together and start some sort of collaborative effort in determining the most accurate price. It's to become the de-facto standard for pricing domains and after the release of version 3.0 in the next 1-2 months it will either be at that quality or very close to that quality level.

Keep in mind, NameWorth just had it's second birthday in March, and has been through several small and 1 major release, most recently in January of last year. But if you look at the sale of Recursion.com, I believe NameWorth was the only appraisal service that was anywhere close at the time. It had estimated a price of $300k with a ballpark range of $300k-600k) and the sales price was about $900k. I believe even the $300k number was 10-21 times more accurate than any competitor. The competitors have had much more time and one of them does over $3 Billion in sales per year. That is a lot higher than my budget.


Domain appraisals are worthless and with the only intent to appraise domains following the appraiser intentions.
Domain appraisals are worthless by definition, and the most amazing is the amount of domainers following and believing domain appraisal tools like the GD one, and wasting hundreds and thousands of dollars on a daily basis just because the GD appraisal tool says the sh*t is worth $3k or $5k.
The only thing that can give you a close picture of a domain value are previous similar sales, that's a fact, and not an "appraisal" that is just made to inflate or demean the real value of a domain, and ultimately to make a domainer spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on the daily auction by an appraisal tool "order".

But what would it be worth to you and your customer to have a domain appraisal they could trust that closely matches your valuation? Could that reduce buyer uncertainty? I think so.

Same experience here. It's simply nobody there at support for a few months. And I tried to contact them on several occasions, including recent problem to upgrade to higher membership level (which I never did at the end due to non-responce). Also back in November I was trying to contact the owner thru LinkedIn - same, no reply, althrough he accepted the invitation. I don't think someone there is ''actively behind'' now, it's seems like this platform is run by inertia...

Hi Vadim, I did receive 2 emails from you during my 8 week vacation period. Your first one looks like it corrected itself and the second one about upgrading I didn't have an easy fix for as there was some exception that was happening in this case. I apologize for the delay and have responded to both.


Hi Bob. When I say "The only thing that can give you a close picture of a domain value are previous similar sales, that's a fact," I mean previous similar sales with those keywords.


That would be obviously an exception, Bob.


And that's another exception. You can virtually ask from $1 to $10K or whatever for a brandable or invented word. It if sounds good to the buyer and he is willing to pay whatever for that invented word, that's up to him.


I also don't want to be provocative here, but I totally disagree with that. In fact, the only valuation of a domain value if that of its owner.
No external valuation will say for what I am going to sell my domain. But that's the aim of the automated valuations, to make you believe that's the value of your domain.


If that would be true and we had to believe on domain appraisals, Mr. Schwartz would have never sold a domain over $10k, never ever.

Sure, and their third party indication will tell them that your domain is worth $10 bucks. Again, if I had to believe on the buyer's valuation of my domain names, I would never have sold them over $100.

This is true. You can price your domain at any level you want and that will obviously be the sales price (or no sale). But there is going to be a plane of value in which the Objective Value of your domain can be calculated. Based on the quality of the domain I can tell you that ZeroRecursion.com will not sell for the same price as Recursion.com, but it probably has some value (which is probably why it is registered). I can also predict that More.com will sell for more than GetMore.com. And both of those will sell for more than GetMoreToday.com, and YouCanGetMore.com will likely sell for less than all of the other choices.

My suggestion, would be taking this Objective Value, and when you reach your pinnacle of doing deals, do what Rick does and get the most from the sale by maximizing the Subjective Value. Rick sold Teem.com (which NameWorth estimates at $1 million), and I think sold it for between $35k-$40k cash. But he did that with an equity agreement that totaled $972,000 or more after the company sold to a larger company.

So my suggestion is go off of the Objective Price and say, yes this is what it is valued at, but "I really have an attachment to this domain", or "it is really worth much more to me", and float the equity idea. When a company has made nothing, negotiating future equity that doesn't exist yet may be easier than trying to double the current negotiated price, and as in Ricks case can add 25-30 times more value to the deal.

Related to this same subject, look at the sellers of FitBit.com & Vivint.com. Both of these domains sold for $5,000 early in the founding of each company. Vivint sold for $3.2 Billion to Sunrun in July 2020 and Fitbit sold to Google for $2.1 billion in 2019. Ten million dollars would be a 0.476% equity stake of $2.1 Billion. Do you think a 1/2 percent equity would have been hard to negotiate for their ideal name? Probably not.
 
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Thanks Bob for the great writeup on the subject. Sorry I'm a few weeks late. I've been on here, but just haven't done a search for biix for some time.



For the record, biix was just Soft Launched in August of 2020, so I don't believe the reference that it "hasn't been updated in a very long time" could be factually true.

Today, we've also just released a White Label option. You can see some example sites at BetterNames.com & ProdigyDomains.com (test environment).

I think it's important to keep in mind the number and the type of support requests that I get regularly and that the site is still in "Beta Launch" mode. Because of such, I've had to prioritize inquiries and I may not have gotten to yours in a timely manner.

For example. I just spent over an hour this morning responding to 1 customer inquiry. This was an investor with 1000s of domains who is interested in listing them and he sent me an email today. The investor was also a "prior" NameWorth subscriber.

What I've had to do to keep up with emails and to keep things moving is group them into categories and prioritize them.

Taken Care of Within Hours:
  • Sales Related (biix Sales) - 100% are taken care of within hours
  • Refund related (refunds on NameWorth) - 95% are done on the same day
Taken Care of Within 24-48 Hours
  • Customers wanting to upgrade or downgrade (NameWorth) - 95% within 24-48 hours
  • Customers having a technical issue (uploading domains at biix, or something not working at NameWorth) - 90% within 24-48 hours
Taken Care of Within a Week
  • Advice requests for Sellers who are actively making sales on biix or current NameWorth customers - 90% within a week
Taken Care Within a Month or Longer
  • Open ended requests. I had one a few days back that said, "I have 5 domains I want to sell, how do I get them listed and sold". I'm all for helping new people, but you need to make some level of effort. Try to sign up for an account or try to add your domains first and then I'll be happy to help if you get stuck.
Likely Won't Get a Response
  • Requests for consultation. A couple weeks ago someone asked me to call them because they have 100 very valuable domains, which ended up being very mediocre. I'm really not interested in scheduling a call, interrupting whatever I have planned and talking on the phone about a custom plan for selling mediocre domains. I have nearly 8,000 domains of my own (many of them also mediocre), am trying to run 2 businesses and start up a 3rd so I'm somewhat short on time and I don't have the time to get on the phone whenever someone feels the whim to do so. They kept insisting we talk on the phone for their open ended session of inquiries, so I just ignored them eventually. Don't get me wrong, if a buyer wants to talk on the phone, I'll be on the phone within minutes or hours. But while I'm in a "beta" phase of releasing something, I'm not going to take a call like this. Mainly because I know it won't be the last call. This will just be the first of many requests from this customer.
  • Appraisal Confirmations from users that have no names listed at biix, and just a free account at NameWorth. For some customers who really need some direction, I've spent many hours sending detailed responses to all the various requests. But for those who aren't making an effort to sell on biix, or to spend some time looking at NameWorth results, my time has limits.
  • Repeated requests to fix something that doesn't fall in the current development timeline. If you have a good idea, I'll add it to the development queue and I appreciate that, but repeated requests for the same feature will end up getting your emails ignored. (unfortunately, I think yours fell here, even though the active request was for a support request regarding help uploading domains (mixed with a repeat request), so I apologize for that, but I had been accustomed to several of your emails before this being only about development efforts that were falling outside of my current efforts).
Thanks for the support and for the concern. Admittedly, after the great year that 2020 was (sarcasm), I took about 6-8 weeks in early 2021 and purposely didn't care about anything and just reflected on things. If a sale came though I would get to it the same day, or if a refund request came through, I'd try to get to it within a day (wasn't always successful). So if you wrote to me some time between January and February, you may have been disappointed.

My time off was somewhat like this scene in Office Space.





I think I talked to you about this via email sometime in March (or before), but you'll never get 3-4 companies to come anywhere close to agreeing on the price of domains. For many years, and probably now, KBB was the leader in car values. There were other guides out there, but no one used them.

As far as comparing NameWorth to other services, I'm going to have a biased opinion when talking about any other appraisal service. The reason for that is because I started NameWorth after being a domain investor for over 15 years and realizing that no appraisal services worked. I never used them and despised them like many domain investors.

The reason I didn't like appraisal services was because I would typically sell domains at 2-100 times higher than appraisal services were stating. Below are my sales via lease with the estibot estimates next to each sale. There are only 2 estimates that were in my favor out of 19! That is an accuracy of 10.5%. The other 89.5% of the time it would have lost large amounts of money for me. The biggest offenders were fluux.com which I sold via lease (below) for $15,000, while the estibot value is $70, and PlanToGrow.com which I sold in March for $24,500, which estibot originally priced at $400, but now they've changed it to $25k after-the-fact.

Show attachment 187012


So my plan isn't to come together and start some sort of collaborative effort in determining the most accurate price. It's to become the de-facto standard for pricing domains and after the release of version 3.0 next in the next 1-2 months it will either be at that quality or very close to that quality level.

Keep in mind, NameWorth just had it's second birthday in March, and has been through several small and 1 major release, most recently in January of last year. But if you look at the sale of Recursion.com, I believe NameWorth was only appraisal service that was anywhere close at the time. It had estimated a price of $300k with a ballpark range of $300k-600k) and the sales price was about $900k. I believe even the $300k number was 10-21 times more accurate than any competitor. The competitors have had much more time and one of them does over $3 Billion in sales per year. That is a lot higher than my budget.




But what would it be worth to you and your customer to have a domain appraisal they could trust that closely matches your valuation? Could that reduce buyer uncertainty? I think so.



Hi Vadim, I did receive 2 emails from you during my 8 week vacation period. Your first one looks like it corrected itself and the second one about upgrading I didn't have an easy fix for as there was some exception that was happening in this case. I apologize for the delay and have responded to both.




This is true. You can price your domain at any level you want and that will obviously be the sales price (or no sale). But there is going to be a plane of value in which the Objective Value of your domain can be calculated. Based on the quality of the domain I can tell you that ZeroRecursion.com will not sell for the same price as Recursion.com, but it probably has some value (which is probably why it is registered). I can also predict that More.com will sell for more than GetMore.com. And both of those will sell for more than GetMoreToday.com, and YouCanGetMore.com will likely sell for less than all of the other choices.

My suggestion, would be taking this Objective Value, and when you reach your pinnacle of doing deals, do what Rick does and get the most from the sale by maximizing the Subjective Value. Rick sold Teem.com (which NameWorth estimates at $1 million), and I think sold it for between $35k-$40k cash. But he did that with an equity agreement that totaled $972,000 or more after the company sold to a larger company.

So my suggestion is go off of the Objective Price and say, yes this is what it is valued at, but "I really have an attachment to this domain", or "it is really worth much more to me", and float the equity idea. When a company has made nothing, negotiating future equity that doesn't exist yet may be easier than trying to double the current negotiated price, and as in Ricks case can add 25-30 times more value to the deal.

Related to this same subject, look at the sellers of FitBit.com & Vivint.com. Both of these domains sold for $5,000 early in the founding of each company. Vivint sold for $3.2 Billion to Sunrun in July 2020 and Fitbit sold to Google for $2.1 billion in 2019. Ten million dollars would be a 0.476% equity stake of $2.1 Billion. Do you think a 1/2 percent equity would have been hard to negotiate for their ideal name? Probably not.
Thanks for taking the time to respond with such an extensive reply.
If it helps, I think your appraisal site is the most "accurate" from all the appraisal sites, so I will give you again my thoughts and feedback about what I would do... think about the GD appraisal, it's free and it has become a "standard" for some domain investors... now think if everybody could see your appraisals freely and without having to register.
I think that gaining visits and "name" would make your site more popular and stronger in the long run. If it appraises domains higher (and better) than GD and Estibot, I bet your site would gain quite a nice track between domainers (and ultimately end users clicking on domainers link to the domain appraisal).
What do you prefer, having a few registered users, or having thousands of daily visits? These are just my thoughts thinking about improving your appraisal site because I think that your appraisals are more accurate than the GD or Estibot ones (for the few appraisals that I have seen from your site).
Just my two cents. (y)
Anyway congrats for your appraisal site (y)
 
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@NameBuyer.com Hi Garett, welcome back. Great to see you here and loving the news about the sites' latest developments and plans. Wishing you every success with them.

My only comment regarding what's happening now is to suggest you try to get a part time administrator who could be trained to answer many of the simpler questions. I'm sure that could be done at a reasonable cost and would pay for itself with higher subscription numbers. Maybe over time add a FAQ or knowledge base section to each of the sites, too, whether open or restricted to subscribers only.

You are providing a very valuable service, for which Estibot, for instance, charges a lot more. Others, similarly, only allow a small number of free appraisals then charge, most of them more than you do. You already have a reasonably generous free limit and your subscription fees are hardly testing for most people.

On the other hand, we all have to accept that most of us are intrinsically lazy. If you can make a profit from their lazy-led questions (including my own - if somebody else will tell me I often don't go to the trouble of finding out for myself), go for it.
 
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@NameBuyer.com

We haven't communicated before, but for what it's worth here are a few suggestions:

1- Make it possible for people to get 2 or 3 Simple and Basic appraisals without having to subscribe or create an account. In the long run this might help you get more subscribers.

2- Offer a more detailed appraisal for those who subscribe to the paid version by including such things as an assessment of the Probability of Making a Sale in regards to different scenarios such as in a Wholesale or Retail setting and also for Short or Long Term commitments. We all have seen a lot of those domains that sell at wholesale prices in the four figures between domainers and then are sold to end users later on at retail prices in the five or even six figures. So a thorough assessment of all the inherent potentials in a domain name could create an added value to the services that you provide.

3- Familiarize yourself with AI and find out about new ways to train your system so that it can learn the inherent value and importance of the keywords in the domain and the added value that certain keywords can create when combined together in the right order. The problem that most current appraisal systems have is that they lack these basic understandings and abilities.

Good luck and try to stand out amongst the competition by being ahead of the times.

(keep in mind that these are just some suggestions from the perspective of a potential future customer, ultimately you should rely on your own judgement as to what’s best for your business.)

IMO
 
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@oldtimer, much of what you are suggesting is already available with each assessment. I am a subscriber and find these aspects very useful in setting my own price - I don't always agree with NW's. Unless I'm missing something in what you say?

Try the free version. It only allows a restricted number of searches per month but it's enough to get a clearer idea of what's in there. Which is a lot better than most. Don't forget to scroll. There's a lot more below the first visible screen.
 
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Unless I'm missing something in what you say?

There is a difference if you are playing chess against a computer script or if you are playing against an AI that has mastered the game.

Unlike the AI the computer script doesn't really understand the game, it's just programmed to make certain moves without having the ability to predict and counteract your strategy.

I don't always agree with NW's.

And that's at the heart of the issue here, if appraisal platforms start to employ AI and train it to master the domaining game (same as it has done with chess) then you would be able to have as much faith in the appraisals that you get from these platforms as the ones that you might get from the most experienced and knowledgeable domainers and brokers in the Industry.

AI is being employed in many other Industries as we speak and it's learning to master those Industries pretty fast. The most advancements that we have seen in the domain Industry so far is that Godaddy is fixing to add the Buy Now option to its sales landers after 10 years. :xf.frown:

The domain Industry needs to catch up with the times too specially when it comes to training AI so that it can be integrated into the existing platforms and operations.

IMO
 
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@oldtimer your faith in AI is quite touching. And, if I may say so, very premature.

In fact it's too early to predict with any clarity what effects AI may have on the domaining sector but I fear it won't be in the positive ways you predict for the typical NP member. The smaller players.

Who are going to be the first to employ and exploit it? I strongly suspect it will be the monoliths. Those big enough to directly employ the required expertise, whether directly, per project or on a consultancy basis for those already with capable development teams in-house. And it won't be for our benefit. Purely for their own.

My own philosophy on this is make hay while the sun shines. It is shining now.

The clouds are already on the horizon, though, with too much consolidation by big players in order, again not to help us, but to grab a bigger slice of the pie without sharing any of it. And that is the more likely way, if at all, AI will eventually be deployed.

IMO.
 
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