HYPHENATED .COM domains are BACK IN FASHION!

Just sold sushi-man.com from an Epik SSL lander for $4200. This is one of Epik's O&O domains. I don't normally report sales but these days we are routinely asking for $10K+ for good hyphen .COM names and seeing sincere engagement.

The great gTLD experiment has been run. I now routinely sell even ccTLD registrants are upgrading from their ccTLD to .COM if they can afford it. I was late to acknowledge it but the risk-reward equation for speculators overwhelmingly favors .COM.

When it comes to hyphenated .COM, SEO is your friend. I recommend to use SSL landers but any SEO lander will probably do the trick to drive inquiries.

 

With all due respect, I do not think they are nearly as popular as you indicate.

In addition, all hyphenated names completely fail the Radio Test and deliver some free traffic to the non-hyphen name, right?

 

Congrats on the sale, but I would mark this one as a one off sale, you asked, and they paid. Had it been make offer most probably would have been in the $1-2K range in hoping to unload it. Hyphen names are still pretty slow go, I would recommend newbies stay away until they have more sales under their belt.

 

I see the evidence that the world is heading to .COM. People are systematically upgrading from .WHATEVER to .COM. Even the trend .AI and .IO upgrade to .COM when they have the money. However most cannot afford the pure .COM so they settle for a variant. So, check this:



Which is better? Sushi-Man.com is obviously superior to what is ranking there.

This one is already occupied by a Japanese restaurant:

http://sushiman.com/

So good luck prying it loose.

I rest my case. I think high quality hyphen .COM domains at $5.49 with Epik SSL landers is a viable speculation. Let's see what the stats show. I am sharing a data point from the bridge. Feel free to ignore it.

 

Report sales to DnJournal and gain free exposure.

 

What you say makes logical sense, but 99 times out of 100 the end user looks at the price, and then goes and registers SushiManNewton.com SushiManMA.com or SushiMan617.com. I think many veteran domainers alike have grown old, and tired waiting for end users to adopt hyphens on a more grand scale, but it has been molasses frankly. Even for the sake of brand protection, I always thought they made sense, but the sales just never materialize. Now I am sure you have a very large, and diverse portfolio with fixed priced landers, and as you said good luck getting the direct .com, so I would say .net, or hyphen would be the best case scenario as .man is not live yet. I think you got the better end of the stick on that sale, as most one off restaurant operators are usually working with $500-$5K budgets, so for a hyphen domain getting that top end is a very good sale.

 

Thanks.

Obviously no hyphen is better but for brandability, I can do way more with Sushi-man than I can do with Sushi-Man-Newton.

Let's say you call yourself SushiManNewton.com. Now you want to open another location in Framingham or Boston. You're hosed. Get another domain. Oops.

I am going to advise our clients to allocate up to 10% of their portfolio to hyphen .com. The market is still pricing it as toxic sludge, but it is not.

I think the URL shorteners are the safe bet. If you can go from SushiManNewton.com to Sushi-Man.com, you got an upgrade. Feel free to disagree.

 

I sold a hyphenated .COM in the last couple weeks for $14K. It was probably a term that would have sold for $500,000+ without the hyphen.

However, I will say hyphenated sales are few and far between even for top quality terms that make sense.
That type of sale is an outlier.

Brad

 

The cost of doing business for many small businesses especially restaurants is pretty cut throat especially with rising taxes, and rents.

You gave the scenario of SushiManNewtwon.com in regards to multiple stores, but if they had gone SushiManMA.com, or SushiMan617.com they have the option for multiple stores built in. Another well used option is always THE, which is also taken. I don't remember the last time I sold a hyphen domain, but like any .net sale today, I am happy to get rid of them any chance I get, and I think most domainers who have held for a while feel the same way. I think your feeling the Euphoria of a pretty good sale, although probably small for what you do on an annual basis, a sale is a sale.

There is lots of knowledge on this site, especially people who have gone all in on hyphens, I look forward to hearing their side of it also. Always room for new opportunity, and you never know where you will find it. Many times I have seen lower budget, or no budget inquires who can't afford .com's go, and register hyphens, but these are people who are not willing to pay anything significant for a domain in the first place.

 

Congrats @Rob Monster ! Nice sale

I actually like Hyphenated names, though I have yet to sell one, though I don't own many to begin with so not much room to gauge there. They have their place though , sometimes make a phrase/wording look better such as repeating Letters on the end of one word and the begining of the next.

I would have to say that currently right now my favorite hyphen that I own would have to be

DeFi-Loans (com)

The luck soul that is sitting with the non hyphenated parked is sitting on a massive fortune to come. As for my hyphenated version , I don't plan on accepting /selling this for anything less than 5figs.

Thanks for sharing your sale with with us.

 

Just got another 4 figure offer now. This one for pro-techsecurity.com. It had 2672 visits to the landing page so I know it is worth more. Now listed:

https://pro-techsecurity.com/

Let's see if he buys it today.

 

I own a few, like red-news.com, e-deposit.com, red-parrot.com equity-group.com and a few others and I've sold around 5 of them, but just for xxx, could not get more. In the same time, I own around ten nonhyphens where the hyphen equivalent is developed, but could not get a good price for them, so probably depends on taste, budget and a few other factors.

 

I would switch to Make Offer pricing and use Epik SSL landers. Or you can sell them to me for $XXX and we'll do it for you. Forget development. Just put up the SSL landers, add a bit of SEO content if you like, and wait for offers. They will come. PM me if you need help getting started or if you need to liquidate those names.

 

Rob, when you have a very large portfolio you are going to get a few lucky sales here and there, you might even sell a four word domain, but whether that translates into a trend for everyone else is something that we have to wait and see. Maybe you are on to something, considering that there is a class of small businesses that don't care that much about having the absolute best domain and also don't have all the knowledge and expectations that domainers have and so if the trend picks up then perhaps more people can sell domains from the Epik drop lists especially those whom you are thinking about helping from the other thread. IMO

 

Visually not stunning, protech-security.com looks right, one of those oldies registered at netsol with a dead page, people are looking for something. Otherwise the domain had prior been with the backpack parking girl dating back to 2008, hopefully it's time it finds a new home. If you can sell two hyphen names, including a not so pretty one like this before lunch today, that would be pretty amazing.

 

Granted, it could be the lucky dog thing. Entirely possible.

I am not that long on hyphen names:



About 13% of the O&O portfolio. I think we'll take that up to 20%. It is pretty much all .com, by the way.

However, we are seeing multiple legit offers daily on hyphen names now which we were not seeing 3 months ago. There's that.

 

I got Single-guys.com hoping for good

 

The ripple effect is working in the digital real estate markt too, and the center is .com. I realized it when I watched the wave spreading from 2L to 3L to 4L, 2C, 3C, etc.

 

As you are currently executing it, there is zero SEO potential there, and the ad blockers are making the lander quite useless:


You can sell it to @Gube. I am giving him a buy fund.

 

I own singles-online.com
I reckon it one of my best .com domains

 

Dot coms with hypens are not in fashion. They sell from time to time.
You are mistaken.

 

I may more carefully check this and write it up but I used NameBio to do a quick check. Looking just at .com and over the past 5 years hyphenated domains represent 1.79% of sales recorded in NameBio. If I use Dofo to see the percentage of hyphenated domain names for sale currently in .com, that is 3.57%. I also looked at average sales prices - without hyphen over the 5 years $1533 and both with and without $1549 (so some higher priced sales did have hyphens).

It is possible that a shorter period will show a stronger performance of hyphenated domains.

This is for .com. A year or so ago I looked at .de and recall it was not surprisingly something like 17% of sales have a hyphen. Also I recall that the percentage of .org sold with hyphens was significantly higher than for .com, probably because .org sells more globally compared to .com dominance in North Amereica.

Bob

 

@Bob Hawkes

you are good with statistics...

Question:
of all .com domains registered, how many are with hyphen (1 hyphen, 2 hyphen) vs. non-hyphen ?


I am not talking about domain-sales, but about registered domains.
Is there a way to figure this out ?

 

is this really about selling domains with hyphens or about selling something else?

because..... when a buyer is interested, it really doesn't matter where it's parked.

imo...

 

It is because I see a decent amount of inquiry volume, I am sharing anecdotal evidence that is repeating. I think there are asymmetric opportunities there and I will authorize to @Gube and @RaquelPenha to buy more hyphen .com names using profits from sales of hyphen .com sales. This is mainly to prove the point that hyphen .com, notably in the case of URL shortening, is looking interesting. The pattern we are looking for is a case where there are many people already calling themselves something that can be shortened and/or made more versatile with a hyphen name. We'll see if we lose our ass on that. I am guessing not, but yes, the buy-side has to be highly compelling given the lower sell-through rate.