analysis NameWorth Experiment with Real Auctions

[ExDom]

Hello and Happy New Year to all!

I am new to domain flipping, I have bought around 400 domains in the last couple of months and I am pretty sure I have lost my money as I have around $2 parking revenue so far and no buying offers yet! I have listed in every possible site (Afternic,Sedo,Epik,Undeveloped). I have also tried all Automatic appraisal programs and also paid for a few pro estimates at Afternic.

I have paid around 5K for the domains and my wholesale Estibot value is 44K (retail close to 600K)

I did happened upon NameWorth recently through the banner here and I am conducting an experiment to see if it is another useless pricing tool or a breakthrough in the automated pricing appraisal. I have 10 domains listed at GoDaddy auctions for a 5% of the Nameworth retail price, which is the suggested auction level price. According to the site, the names should sell within the 7 day auction with a 90% percent probability.

The names I have listed have an estimated retail value from $950 to $14500 and are a combination of brandable domains and 2-3 english world keyword domains. I will not tell you the domain names before the auction ends so the experiment is not tampered!

How many domains do you believe will be sold in the auction (from 0 to 10)

Happy 2020 and happy domain hunting to all of you!

Dimitrios

 

[Icarusdeck]

I just started domaining, although I happened on it about 5 years ago, but I never took it seriously. Fastword to December 2019, I came back to join domain investing. I do not have as many domains as you do have in your portfolio. A total of 50 names in all. However, I have been using nameworth too to do some appraisal.

I believe it is mostly just like every appraisal site, mostly useless, but I do run my names through and leave them in the can until my mind is clear enough to take some valye judgement.

I will keenly follow your experiment. It will be good to see how well the domains perform against the values ascribed to them by nameworth.

 

[Pazu]

I also have been using NameWorth and am curious about it. I don't think Estibot is as useful because it doesn't give close to what I would consider acceptable prices for endusers. I consider Estibot more as another tool to assess if a name could have any value, but I may base my retail pricing (for inbound) on Nameworth retail price estimates. Nameworth of course, also gives auction estimates, so do you find those are also about 5% of the retail estimate?

It's interesting to me that you can handreg a domain and have a $14500 appraisal on Nameworth, but I don't see why you can't sell a handreg for $14500 in the first year by inbound. I did that before for almost $7000. If the domain is less than 60 days old, keep in mind that they cannot be transferred to another registrar.

I can't help you with guessing what your sell through rate might be, other than to say I just look at Godaddy expiring auctions and don't bother even looking at regular auctions, so I'm not sure if people do that much and you'll get traffic, but they might catch the attention of investors if the Godaddy appraisal is high, because users like me might sort by price estimate looking for golden nuggets.

Please continue posting your observations on this. It's nice that your first post is something potentially helpful to the community. Thanks Dimitrios.

By the way, are there any other Nameworth threads someone could point out here?

 

[ExDom]

I have made a table for comparison, with estimates from Nameworh, Estibot, Godaddy and Domain Index for the 10 domains in question:

NW Retail NW 5% EBOT GD DI
1 1750 87.5 340 1313 0
2 950 47.5 100 1705 0
3 9450 472.5 70 1415 0
4 4450 222.5 1100 1699 0
5 3450 172.5 1000 1508 1550
6 14500 725 1700 1434 0
7 5450 272.5 150 1149 0
8 9450 472.5 280 1245 0
9 9450 472.5 0 1193 0
10 4450 222.5 1100 1136 0

Domains are all Coms, and are either hand registrations or bought as expired in auction. The hand registrations were dropped domains and some had more than 15 years of history.

From a first glance only number 5 has a $1000+ estimate with all four appraisal programs! Let's see if it will sell at the 5% NW Auction price. Note that there is also a "firesale NW price" at 1.5%, maybe I will use it in my next test.

 

[ExDom]

And after 1 week all auctions have ended at GoDaddy and no domains have been sold! I am not sure if the problem was with the valuation of the domains though as they had almost zero visibility.

Most people, myself included, only look at the expired and dropped listings. Probably if even cars . com was offered at a starting price of $12 very few domain investors would notice!

 

[NickB]

Why are any of you basing your evaluations on what an appraisal tool tells you?

Look at past sales of similar keywords, look at the keywords and if they are for sale on other platforms and for how much, check out the brandable sites to see what is selling and for how much, look at how many extensions your domain is taken in and see how many sites have been developed (if any) the ones that are not developed check them out and see if they are for sale on Sedo, Afternic or their own landers and look at the asking prices etc etc....this is not the be all and end all, but will give a rough idea and a place to start.....

In short, do some homework instead of lazily getting prices from a useless tool...

Godaddy does show you some similar sales when you use their appraisal tool so it is not total shite...

 

[biggie]

Hi

i could have spent that $5k on a couple of LLL.org and maybe a nice two-three word .com

don't spend money on appraisal tools and use their results as rationale for registering domain names

imo...

 

[ExDom]

These are some of the coms auctioned:

BritainGold
CentralBankRate This had $1000+ in all major appraisal bots.
GreekCivilWar This was the $14500 NW appraisal.
Kideta
etayes

So are they all crap domains or the problem lies with the almost zero visibility in the 7 day GD auction? I do consider the appraisal bots mostly for keyword searches and pronounceability of the domain.

Of course appraisal bots have serious shortcomings as I have come to realise during my 1st month in the domaining business! However it is fun to be the proud owner of a 50K estibot domain and a 2.something million dollar NW domain! Wish I could sell them at 1% of the estimates!

Cheers!

Dimitrios