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Aged domains question

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Bob Hawkes

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I have a question that I hope someone more experienced in domain investing can provide insight on....

Very frequently I see mention in domain name sales that the domain is aged or how many years old it is, as though this is universally a good thing.

I understand completely how if the domain has been used in a website in a positive way, has received meaningful links from other websites, etc. that being aged is a plus that will make the domain more valuable.

However, what if the domain was first registered say 12 years ago, but has essentially sat parked for most or all of that period? In this case I don't see how being aged is positive, and maybe even it could be negative if an unsuccessful attempt has been made to sell the domain over years. Of course, you may have new ideas for promotion and hope to find success where others have not with the domain name, but I still don't see why per se being aged is always positive and meaningful.

Or am I missing something? Thanks for any insights.

Bob
 
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I will add one more thing. Gold is accepted as the safest investment. Because it's the oldest investment. So age always matters. You can apply domain drops to gold pricing mechanism to understand why domains lose value if they drop. I will give an example to explain.
Assume gold price is $1276 (currently $1276) and you have a domain that is worth $1276. When you let that domain drop, its value becomes $10, reg fee (or $50-100 if you bought via drop-catching service). This would be the same thing when gold price suddenly became $10. Would it be possible for gold to become $1276 again? No. Once it becomes $10 it will not be $1276 again in the short term. Because if you buy something for $10 you don't wait to sell it for $1276, you probably sell it for $100, maybe for $11, but you don't want to wait the price to be $1276 again as most other gold owners would sell for as low as 10% profit. So it would hardly become $1276 again.

Also newly registered domains aren't the same with newly mined gold. Because gold price is known before mined. There are guaranteed buyers who will buy your fresh mined gold for a particular price. Because gold is anonymous like air or water or oil. To make more profit you need to mine more gold. Domain pricing is not like that. You mine (register) only 1 domain, each domain is unique, isn't anonymous. You can't register the same domain for more than once. There is only 1 cars dot com, there is only 1 owner. This is similar to owning a commercial company. Land is similar but is not unique as much as a registered company or a domain name. For instance you can buy a different land near to which you were unable to buy. You may buy any gold from a different shop if you don't like the seller. There are alternatives, you can substitute. When it comes to a particular domain or corporate, you have no option other than convincing the owner to sell it to you. There is no alternative. You buy it or not. Another domain is not the same thing with the one you want to buy. But another gold is the same gold with the one you want. You may a neighbor property or another property in the same city if you couldn't buy the one you want most. You can substitute with another property, if it's a house/apartment you can live in a caravan/hotel room until you found a better accommodation. You can't do the same things when it comes to domains. You can find similar domains for sure but they will be always very different. In fact there are no similar domains at all as the difference between 2 domains is usually too big to call them as similar. Sleeping in a car, in a hotel room, rented apartment or owned apartment are more similar to each other compared to difference between 2 domains.

If we return to the age discussion, if gold wasn't the oldest investment option it wouldn't be the one of the safest investments. Gold is a safe investment mostly because gold is around for a very long time. The exact same "age" criteria or pricing factor works in all investments. Don't be confused with newly registered valuable domains. They will be more valuable when they get older. Because similar domains will be registered and they will be less than valuable than the ones registered today. Age criteria will work for new domains as well. This is just a relative thing that causes confuse. The new domains of today will be old domains of tomorrow. When they get older they will be more valuable like land, gold or a commercial company.

Value is usually gained by time, mostly because human population keeps raising while the sources are finite/scarce. You can't really buy something that's worth $1000 for $10, reg fee. The chances are not very higher than the chances in lottery, and you have less chance than lottery if you are newbie in domain names. There might be instances, some experienced domainers may hand register today and may sell for $1,000. But if you make it as a numbers game, you will most likely make loss (no matter how you are experienced) when you start playing with bigger numbers. The math is simple, you register 100 domains for $1,000 -unless if you use coupons to register for $0.99-. If you don't sell 1 domain for $1000, or 10 domains for $100 each out of every 100 newly hand regged domains you make loss. But if you bought an old domain for $1,000 or 10 old domains for $100 each you would more likely sell them for $1,000. Also $10 renewal fee is more negligible for domains that are worth $100+. I mean you can wait longer to sell for a higher price, more age will increase chances to sell it for a higher price especially if your portfolio has only aged domains that are worth $100+ each. I am against to hand register in general. I hand registered a few domains for testing purpose only and by using discount codes. I am not against to hand register .com's if the fee is less than $1-2. It would function as an educational purpose when you want to try and see something in your mind. I prefer aged domains to buy, especially to develop websites. Aged domains make a big difference if developed. I have websites that are on 10+ years old domains and receive non-stop, very stable organic traffic. I didn't add new content for years to almost any of websites as I am lazy. One of my websites has been receiving very stable 200-300 visits per day for many years, other websites are same in terms of stable organic traffic. If you own such a thing it pays its renewal and hosting fees and when it gets older it only becomes more valuable. You only win by just being the owner of it, don't need to do anything to make money at all. You can play a numbers game here when you are doing something profitable. To make more money, you can keep growing your website portfolio on old domains. This is what I do. If you develop a website on a new domain or buy a fresh website you will need to keep adding new content otherwise the traffic dies, so you will have to pay renewal fee as loss or let its domain drop. Of course there are many other SEO factors. In my opinion one of the most important and the easiest SEO factor is having an aged domain.

There are end users who don't mess with age in domains. They are mostly the people who don't care or don't know about organic traffic or the people who want to create new a brand. If you have a large budget for promotion and/or brand recognition, you may not care if the domain is aged or not. Because large budget for promotion tolerates negative effects of a newly registered domain. This doesn't work for most independent webmasters like me as they don't have their own product to sell. Most webmasters earn from ppc ads or from cpa commissions, they can't buy ads to receive traffic as buying ads to sell ads isn't profitable and is prohibited by most ppc/cpm ad networks like adsense. Online advertisement maybe profitable or is worth to try if you have your own product to sell online or if you want to create a new brand with a large, stable long term budget. Some online businesses may run merely on purchased traffic based on ppc or cpa. It's a different business model. They can start a business on a newly registered domain as they are ready to pay drawbacks of a new domain. Each domain has its own buyer and seller. Every buyer, seller and domain is unique. If you are selling a domain or website or selling anything, you can't really know why the buyer wants to buy it or what the buyer will do with it. I see some domains I let them expire are now websites, someone re-registered my dropped domains and developed websites on them. Some domains I sold have been parked for years with no sale purpose or some of my ex-domains DNS don't resolve. I can't know why they bought those domains or why some people re-registered my ex-domains which I found them crap and let them expire. I or they must know something incorrectly :) Each buyer has different interests, budget, background and business experiences. However, if you sell a newly registered domain for $1000+ it's not a reliable representative for future sales. But if you sell a 20 years domains for $1000+ you will more likely sell your other 20 years old domains for $1000+ each.. In the worst scenario you can keep renewing your old 20 years old domain as it's usually worth to renew, especially if you buy it for $100+. If you buy a newly registered domain for $100, you can't know if you should renew or let it drop. You may need to renew a newly registered domain for 5-10 years until you sell it for profit.
 
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This is incorrect. There are domains that have almost no value 20 years ago like virtual reality, bitcoin, eth, and so on. If they had value like cars dot com, they would be registered 20 years ago.

I was talking about a possibility of cars not being registered years ago purely hypothetically.While it’s very unlikely that cars would have remained unclaimed for much longer, it’s not entirely fictitious to imagine them being registered with a 2-3 year margin of error of the original registration date. The fact that there are domains, known to be hidden gems, that have avoided detection despite their apparent value is a proof that values can be overlook even if they are hiding in plain sight. Spotting such domains in the drop lists is another sign of existence of significantly under-priced assets whose value might have gone undetected by the original registrant or unnoticed by anyone else..

Regarding domains like bitcoin, etc heralding new technologies it’d' be almost impossible to predict a distant future, much less to learn the names by which it’ll be known. But as far as the example given above of eth, even though it didn’t have the potential value of the cars at the time of registration, it was actually registered 16 years ago. However, despite its advanced age, this domain (eth) was very unlikely to have been registered back then for the reasons that the registrant somehow could have predicted and foresaw its future value vis-a-vis it being rooted in introduction of a technology completely unknown at the time (otherwise, for example, eth would have been owned by the founder of the product/technology itself). Then the primary values resided in eth had to do with it simply being a 3L domain and as a potential acronym.
But cars dot com will be 40 years old after 20 years if it registered 20 years ago. Currently a 20 years old domain will be always older than 1-19 years old domains.

Percentually the age difference between domains is going to be minimized the older they become. While percentually the difference between a 20 yo and fresh domain is huge, in 20 years time, when they are 40 and 20 respectively, percentual gap between them will diminish, and in 100-200 years from now, with them turning into 120-220 and 100-200 yo veterans correspondingly it will be barely perceptible.
Your gold example doesn't fit because of this. Gold may be mined today but it was valuble before they mined.

We can replace gold with an example of bitcoin to illustrate a point given by an analogy clearer. A bitcoin bought at the time of its debut for pennies had very little value compared to the value of gold in the past tense by virtue of gold special properties and its being used as a recognized standard. So, had a bitcoin been bought for pennies in the beginning of the bitcoin era, it would still be worth as much today as a bitcoin acquired last year after having appreciated in value. As per your post:
For instance you could buy 1 bitcoin for $1 in the past. But today you have to pay almost $6,000 for the same 1 bitcoin.

Whether the bitcoin was bought for one dollar years ago or for a thousand last year, today their worth would be equal.
 
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You are mixing the economic fundamentals by false examples. Gold and domains are similar as they are scarce. But each domain is unique has unique name like a serial number, each gold is anonymous.
I was using an analogy defined as a ''resemblance in some particulars between things otherwise unlike; or comparison based on such resemblance''.‘ It was used in the same way you have used gold/land/bitcoins as partial comparables to domains as per your earlier quotes:
But bitcoin is scarce or its quantity is fixed. Bitcoin is similar to gold or land
Age lowers the value of a food (meat, egg, tomato, fish) while raising the value of scarce things (gold, bitcoin, domain, land)...The same mechanism applies to domains.

And it was used in the same fashion you have likened the quality aspect of age being fundamental to the domains and human life experience:

[/QUOTE] Even older humans are more expensive than younger ones. Seeing a 50 years old doctor is more expensive than seeing a 35 years old doctor or an advocate, technician, accountant, etc. Because you can't revert back the time, accelerate it or stop it or slow it down. Little children want to become adult faster, want to get rid of childhood but time passes in its own speed. Elderly people miss the old days when they were child or young but they pass away like all the other previous humans.[/QUOTE]

This was understood to be drawing a line under the age as a point that age with respect to domains can be a double-edged sword. The age as such permeating the fabric of existence is conducive to the process where domains, like humans, may reach a prime age with peak values. Subsequently,just as observed in humans, going beyond a certain age (when for instance, a domain loses actuality by becoming over-mature), entails erosion and loss of values. That is not to say that a domain once outdated can not become relevant again, which is seen in some of the hot domains from the early days of internet that represented by now discarded technologies, re-entering the space with a new twist.

When making these comparisons evident on some levels there was never confusion as to likening domains to human life - the usage of analogy has as its purpose to discern similarities between the two objects in the sea of core differences.
 
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I will add one more thing. Gold is accepted as the safest investment. Because it's the oldest investment. So age always matters. You can apply domain drops to gold pricing mechanism to understand why domains lose value if they drop. I will give an example to explain.
Assume gold price is $1276 (currently $1276) and you have a domain that is worth $1276. When you let that domain drop, its value becomes $10, reg fee (or $50-100 if you bought via drop-catching service).This would be the same thing when gold price suddenly became $10. Would it be possible for gold to become $1276 again? No. Once it becomes $10 it will not be $1276 again in the short term. Because if you buy something for $10 you don't wait to sell it for $1276, you probably sell it for $100, maybe for $11, but you don't want to wait the price to be $1276 again as most other gold owners would sell for as low as 10% profit. So it would hardly become $1276 again.

In some cases are quite different scenarios when talking of domain names. You are correct to say dropped domains are bought /re-register for $10. But some are sold for big price shortly after dropped or cut.

Why do you think people are scrambles for expired domains?
Worthy domains are gold in domain industry no matter the age, but though aged ones add more values.
 
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Why do you think people are scrambles for expired domains?
Worthy domains are gold in domain industry no matter the age, but though aged ones add more values.

People are scrambles for expired domains because expired domain market is cheaper as there are less end users. Players in expired domain market are mostly resellers who buy cheap to sell for a higher price. So, once a domain drops it becomes cheaper. My point is still valid. When domain age becomes suddenly zero, its value and its market price are affected. Expired domain market is a proof of this.

However it's obvious market value of a domain doesn't consist of its age. Because there will always be some end users who don't care about age and their demand will affect overall domain prices.

Also a dropped domain might be sold between multiple resellers until it's sold to an end user. As each reseller will add their own profits to the price, end user price could be as high as before the domain dropped. Price can be same no matter if the end user cares about age (whether the domain drops or not). However this doesn't disprove your point as long as end users can't buy an expired domain as cheap as resellers.

So, you are right about the end result in the current market conditions.
 
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Floppydisk.com - aged 16 years - vs eth.com aged 16 years - which one would bring more value and be more relevant and trending today? Both have value, both have respective age and value to respective collector, but one of these is much more on fire for the moment and floppy disks are gone and completely irrevelent.
 
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I can assure you it makes zero difference period. Suck ass names sell all the time that were registered mere minutes ago. People don't know to care.
 
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Gradient.com is on the auction block at GD expired. This is a grandaddy, DOB is 1990. Currently the highest bid sits just under 28k. Out of the 100 bidders, is it the age, the name quality, or a combination of both driving the bids?

To the majority, Gradient is a spectacular name that sells itself, whether it was registered yesterday or 30 years ago. To me, the 1990 birthyear would be a motivating factor :).
 
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Out of the 100 bidders, is it the age, the name quality, or a combination of both driving the bids?
**Bids, not bidders** doh. About 22 bidders.
This auction just went stratospheric. Generic 1 word, almost 30 yrs old. Jumped from 55k to over $120k in 2 minutes.
Wish it was going to my collection..
 
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Is it a question of age or limitations of the mind ?

“Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”
M.Twain
 
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Similar thing happened in 90's for domains. That's why age is a major factor. You can't turn back to 1995 to hand register dozens of 3L.

I think you are allocating the value of domain age to and by equating it with the engine of a time machine :)
Granted, if you were given a throwback line to the past by having the chance to relieve it once again -without the hindsight of the future- would it have turned the other way this time around or would you still be finding yourself missing the bandwagon ? Had you been placed into the magic chamber adorned with domain names instead of amber, would you have found yourself pulling name-containing slips off the wall paper or painting it over with the newest multi-color ? Remember, we have been given plenty of chances to lather, rinse, and repeat the .com gold rush on a smaller scale with crypto-currencies, but instead it led to many pupils repeating the class to get a barely passing grade. The question is: how well did many of us did it right after doing it wrong in the .com boom ? Because according to witnesses, yet once again,the majority was seen being left on the platform holding the tickets to the departing trains :)

Yes, there were great times for the most perceptive of minds to seize the moment of golden registrations, but if you weren't quick enough way back to the dinner table the dinner would have gotten cold or eaten by a dog. Not in the way of dog-eat-dog necessarily, but my dog ate my homework kind of a way:)
 
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I think you are allocating the value of domain age to and by equating it with the engine of a time machine :)

Exactly. It's a very big factor which we can't disregard.

Granted, if you were given a throwback line to the past by having the chance to relieve it once again -without the hindsight of the future- would it have turned the other way this time around or would you still be finding yourself missing the bandwagon ?

If you don't change any variable the result will not change by repeats.
"insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results"
If you had a chance to go back to the past with the exact same conditions, you would do the exact same things that you did in the past :) This is a bit out of the topic of this thread.
 
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@namelancer Exceptions don't break the rule in business. This isn't a natural science.
Another point is you can say "x" will be always "y", to emphasize a business-economics rule, while you mean "usually" by "always". Because when something is usual (if an event or pattern is observed more), it's a rule business. Business, as a science, dictates choosing what most likely will happen, is way different than math, physics where a single occurrence of incompatible outcome or event can break the rule . So, I still defend the rules I stated even after you showed me exceptions (eth, 8888888 ) . To break a rule in business, you should show (should logically prove) incompatible events are the majority or the effect of exceptions (amount of money involved in the exceptions ) are majority (more than 50%).


I realized my initial response left much to be desired by way of explanation. I'll now attempt to demonstrate to you whether you main premise could hold the ground if viewed from a changed perspective.

To this effect, two major shape-shifters must be isolated to identify the core weaknesses :

1. Indeed, exceptions don't break the rule understood within the context of always having the meaning of usually, e, reaching and exceeding the 50 percent threshold of observed events. However, it can not be excluded from the realm of the possible, that by some fluke of design or human nature, there couldn't be accumulation of irregularities to the extent that they, en mass, would tip the scales of the reign by majority. Again, it's not probable, nor is it entirely impossible, given that we operate within the limited range of available options, ie. the constraints of registrations are limited to 63 characters in any given extension. Historically, we have had experience where certain extensions got their market valued altered by all sorts of restrictions, as was the case with Australian country code extension where for a long time people couldn't resell the registered domains in a straight-forward fashion (the loopholes were used instead where domain purchases came bundled with acquisition of a company owing the domain to circumvent then valid rule).

Another example is the ever changing ebbs and flows in movements regulating registration of some of the most desirable single and double digit extensions, with registries first allowing registration of rarities at the dawn of internet to discontinue the practice of new ownership for drops, unless it's done by mutual consent prior to expiry, with registries lining up at potentially appropriating deleted domains (the domains who have done their life-time of service) without legacy of passing the torch forward to the next generation.

A third example would be a particular flair gaining traction for booking domains with the number of digits corresponding to postal indexes or company registration numbers, etc.

Finally, one sees the rule-bending irregularities among 5L vs 6L .coms, with the latter selling for higher sums than their lesser counterparts in the pronounceable category. We could, with computational resources, further extrapolate similar data on dictionary/invented words in adjacent locations to look for pattern there..

To sum it up, evolution or restriction of utility for particular digits could bring about deflation in values. Should the number of irregularities reach a critical mass, they would be a force to be reckoned with in overcoming the default rule as stipulated in the source post. .

2. This point will be made in the spirit of making an appeal both to the law of large numbers and infinitely small numbers respectively.
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Currently, the maximum domain length is 63 characters, while the minimum varies according to extensions (emoji excluded). Starting with comparison of 2N.com vs 3N.com and going on not ad infinity, but stopping somewhere under the 10N.com, the rule may very well hold (except for the real or hypothesized exceptions as noted above or in case of change in circumstances with regards to fluctuation in utility). But move out of the comfort zone, and out of the existing 63 possible N-ed digits, what would be the value of, let's say, 44N.com vs 47N.com ? Well, statistically speaking, 44 N is more scarce than 47 N, and so it's going to be attributed more gravitas. But in real terms of market valuations, would there be a discernible difference in value between these two domains in so far that one is going to be valued higher ? The answer is no, because while mathematically values among the two would be barely distinguishable, since they are separated by infinitesimally small fractions of numbers, their respective (market, e.g.) values would be just as infinitesimally small to make any difference to be perceptible (unless it's an all-seeing algorithm) to the bare eye . Because if the values are close to or are around zero, in market terms they would translate into the rounding up to zero as the financial windfall, or, if we are generous enough, amounting to a registration fee in the best of cases.

Total supply of 3N domains are 10 times of 2N
Total supply of 3L domains are 26 times of 2L (number of letters in English alphabet is 26)

Statistically, randomly chosen 2L will be more expensive than 3L. This is the rule I defend. There might be more exemptions than you showed. But the exemptions don't break this rule.


Actually, in your original statement, you argued for this tendency to be observable across the whole spectrum (from 1N(L), to 2N(L), to 3N(L),, to 4N(L), to 5N(L), etc up to the upper limit, which is now set at 63N(L), or presumed to be even valid for all potential increases in the number of characters) of domains available for registration. This increase in the number of characters, be it specifically numbers or, by implication, letters, is evident from your earlier post, as per :

There are 100 2N.com's, 1,000 3N.com's, 10,000 4N.com, 100,000 5N.com and so on. It's obvious 2N.com will be always more expensive than 3N, 4N, 5N ... domains.
 
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@namelancer "I realized my initial response left much to be desired by way of explanation."
I forgot your initial responses. This is becoming like a doctoral thesis. I didn't understand all of the details in your reply above and indeed you make extraordinarily detailed posts. To reply to your last post above I will need to read your post for 2-3 times to understand it correctly without getting lost in details, and will need to reply all your questions. This will be a long effort for me with no compensation other than being a winner in a debate. I would rather prefer to be a voluntary writer at wikipedia for such a hobby. I will need to write another long post to reply you and long posts maybe found boring by some readers.

In short, I tried to say rarity is an important factor in investments. Rare diamonds, rare sport cars, rare paintings, anything rare is more valuable. As to max 63 characters and the difference between 43N and 47N, it is just the question of delta (the difference). Difference between 2 and 3 is 50%, difference between 43 and 47 is 10%. But it's only the difference on surface like the visible part of an iceberg. For instance, difference between 2 and 3 is 50%, difference 43 and 63 is also 50% but it's not the same 50%. You need to consider total supply (the whole set, not small sets of the sum total).

While rarity is not the only one factor in pricing, rarity is always a factor in all pricing mechanisms.Because if something isn't rare, you can easily substitute it with a cheaper alternative.

Rarity is always a factor in all pricing mechanisms with no exception. The only difference is how you define rarity. For instance can you assume there is a country, city, brand, movie, planet or a very famous person with 63 character long name? :) Yes it can be possible. Then you should define the rarity not based on the length of its name. However such things aren't usual. Therefore, to make the life easier, it's quite easy to define rarity based on length of its name. This is the reason of why most short domains are aged domains. It was practical to register 2N domains first, while it was possible. They are still valuable domains. It doesn't mean there will never be a valuable domain with 63 letters. It's always possible, but it's a low possibility like winning the biggest prize in a national lottery.
 
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