discuss 95% of domains do not sell in five years. Would you take % of website revenue instead of selling?

[garptrader]

Industry turn is in the 1% range, probably lower for alternative extensions. So a 100-domain portfolio with $10/year renewals over five years is likely to generate nearly $5000 in renewal costs with perhaps a few sales. For alternative extensions or those with higher than $10 renewals, the costs could be much higher while sales probability no better. There is often a considerable gap between what domainers believe they can get for a domain and what potential buyers are willing to pay for them. Perhaps an alternative is to recognize that developers do not want to pay serious money for domains even if the project could potentially generate significant revenue / profits. Yes, as a financial professional I realize there is a difference between revenue and profit Of course this would mean having to evaluate a developer's plan -what they plan to do with the site, how likely their project is to be successful, their development experience, and whether the domain investor would prefer to wait for a better proposal. Of course developers who do all the work may not want to give a percentage of revenue or profit to a domainer who did nothing more than register a $10 domain (the outside view that acquiring good domains is as easy as registering them for $10 and renewing them). Thoughts?

 

[Lysted]

Do not think that model works in present day. Years ago, there were transactions done where the seller had a % sharing of revenues. But that was long time ago - and mostly for one worder names. And in most cases, the buyer had a existing site that was making money and they want to rebrand it.

In present day, since such names are not available for resale (or not as plenty). Sellers typically do not want to get into any agreement where they have not seen anything. As a seller, would you really get into such legal agreement for run of the mill domains that run from couple of thousand to 5/7 thousand dollars, and track them - and considering that so many options are available to the buyer. The seller would just take the money and be done with it. Even with high priced domains, escrow.com has a service where the buyer can make the partial payments and pay over time.