Andrew Rosener shared his expertise, insights, and accomplishments in a Q&A article by Elliot.
The parts I found most interesting:
Full article...
The parts I found most interesting:
Elliot: What have you and Media Options been up to lately?
Andrew Rosener: We brokered the sale of 116 three-letter .com domains (3L.com) in the past 12 months alone. We sold one of the only two possible single character .net domains: Q.net. Media Options was involved in the sale of seven two letter .com domains (2L.com) in the past twelve months, approximately 28 or so in total we think. Could be over 30. But the fun ones are the great brands that we’ve sold: Common.com, Scoop.com, Essential.com, Podium.com, Hop.com, Yup.com, Say.com, Perspective.com, Stuff.com, BigData.com, ReputationManagement.com, Safety.com, Blood.com, SelfieStick.com, VR.net, RE.net, Girlfriend.com, Even.com, Bhang.com, Shrooms.com, Nug.com, HigherEducation.com, Frisco.com, Rochester.com, EatFish.com, Annuity.net, Disrupt.com, Brew.com, ZipLines.com, AmericanWest.com, Strawberry.com, Toil.com, Tantra.com, Pug.com, Boobs.com, Willow.com, Important.com, Tuck.com, ContentMarketing.com, Beard.com, Paragon.com, MostWanted.com, Beth.com, LiveJapan.com, BusinessAnalytics.com, Clearlake.com, Badger.com, Ambassadors.com & Mux.com. There are many more but almost all of these mentioned went to end users.
If we were able to report the sales prices for the list above, I can say that our sales this past 12 months would rank above ALL of the top 20 spots on DNJournal’s Year To Date sales chart. So yeah, we’ve been busy!
Elliot: What are some domain industry trends you are noticing?
Andrew Rosener: I think one-word brandable .com domains, real tier 1 grade names, are possibly the most undervalued assets on the planet right now. I think we are facing a potential exponential value correction (upward) over the next couple of years on these names. Things like Jet.com, Dragonfly.com, Home.com, PX.com, MJ.com, Box.com, Rain.com, Apple.com, Amazon.com. These types of brands are going extinct! There are only a handful of top domain investors who truly grasp the enterprise value of such a domain. They are quietly sitting and waiting for the World to catch up.
About 40% of our business is domain acquisitions for startups. Everyone wants the same thing! They want a generic one-word .com that is general enough for a pivot, easy to spell, shorter the better & has a positive ring to it. Well let me tell you, those are getting real hard to find! Harder to find than a burrito in Rome! If any of the new gTLD’s do catch on with end users, as a company name & brand, not just marketing & advertising campaigns, it will be 100% because we simply run out of amazing .com domains. We’ll see whole companies acquired soon only for their name. Because the domain is more valuable than the business that owns it.
Elliot: What does it take to be a professional domain broker?
Andrew Rosener: I think its really important to differentiate the types of brokers we have in the domain industry, because consistently people just say “domain broker” as a blanket description, which it shouldn’t be. Regardless of which category you fall under, you need grit, determination, the gift of gab, discipline and a lot of empathy.
You have guys that are focused on the wholesale market, running newsletters, wholesale marketplaces, auctions & just straight up Skype and chat hustlers. These guys are deal makers. This is how I started out. We still run our newsletter and are actually working on some cool ways to better leverage that. Our domain sales newsletter is probably the longest single owner newsletter in the industry (I think that is probably a fair & true statement, no?). Its a good way to start out, more of a trader really. A matchmaker. But it is getting very crowded. You scrape all day long for small margins but do a higher volume of deals to make up for it (they hope). But you build a network, a reputation & trust. Lot of respect here, this is where you cut your teeth and build thick skin.
Then you have sales people, account managers and sales managers that manage inbound leads for client’s domains, or owner operated domains. There is a strong degree of customer service involved primarily. Different organizations call this role something different. Some would say inside sales, some would say customer service and some would say broker. I think the primary differentiation is the compensation package. They manage inbound leads via phone & email, leverage a CMS to persistently manage those leads and negotiate offers which come in. But little or no outbound solicitation and sales. Very little competitive bidding process to get the highest possible price. To me, a broker creates demand. A sales person, makes sales.
Finally you have the broker; who is doing the outbound sales, solicitations, marketing & broad communication. Creating demand out of nothing but relentless persistence, insight and intuition. This is where we are primarily focused these days. I like to say that our job is to create liquidity in an illiquid market. Our sales process is highly structured, intensive & effective. We are building curated hit lists of anywhere from 50 – 200 different qualified buyers for a particular domain. We don’t just email the WHOIS or hold our nose and guess, we identify the appropriate decision maker at each company. Then we go out and hammer the pipeline for months on end in most cases until the right timing emerges with the right buyer; that’s when the magic happens. We are dialing for dollars and sending emails all day long. I believe Chris sends 200 – 300 emails per day. I used to do 500 points of contact per day (phone and emails) when i first started out. Now we have built a steady pipeline and we are able to plug in premium domains into our domain sales life cycle consistently and effectively.
Elliot: What are you seeing in the new gTLD aftermarket space and what are your short term predictions for selling new gTLD domain names?
Andrew Rosener: I have to say that we have had very little action in the gTLD space aside from acquisitions for clients directly from the registry in most cases. We have acquired some interesting new gTLD domains for ourselves, but primarily either defensively or just for speculation. But on the brokerage side and especially the end user side, I actually couldn’t tell you any sales we have made. I think we have a few actually but none come to mind immediately.
The good gTLD domains that I would be interested in trying to broker are not priced realistically in my opinion. I think pricing is the greatest flaw to the whole program. Pricing should be standardized. If professional domain brokers like myself are confused by pricing, how do you think consumers feel? How about the guy trying to manage a companies domain portfolio to protect their IP? Its a mess.
My short term prediction is that it will become more of a mess before it gets better. I think that 5 years from now great and memorable new gTLD domains will have value, less than .com of course, but value, just like any great and memorable domain name does. There will be some degree of liquidity and some degree of wide consumer recognition. But only the real cherry stuff is worthy of any investment because the premise of the whole thing is to eliminate scarcity. Eliminate scarcity and you have no resale value because your domain is only as valuable or as good as the next best alternative. The difference in value between Common.Online and Common.Web is negligible. But the difference in value between Common.com and either of those two is light years apart.
Thousands of companies and investors will try to get a new gTLD extension in the 2020 round. Probably 10X or more of who applied in the last round. But at the consumer level I think .com is where to be if you want to be.
Andrew Rosener: We brokered the sale of 116 three-letter .com domains (3L.com) in the past 12 months alone. We sold one of the only two possible single character .net domains: Q.net. Media Options was involved in the sale of seven two letter .com domains (2L.com) in the past twelve months, approximately 28 or so in total we think. Could be over 30. But the fun ones are the great brands that we’ve sold: Common.com, Scoop.com, Essential.com, Podium.com, Hop.com, Yup.com, Say.com, Perspective.com, Stuff.com, BigData.com, ReputationManagement.com, Safety.com, Blood.com, SelfieStick.com, VR.net, RE.net, Girlfriend.com, Even.com, Bhang.com, Shrooms.com, Nug.com, HigherEducation.com, Frisco.com, Rochester.com, EatFish.com, Annuity.net, Disrupt.com, Brew.com, ZipLines.com, AmericanWest.com, Strawberry.com, Toil.com, Tantra.com, Pug.com, Boobs.com, Willow.com, Important.com, Tuck.com, ContentMarketing.com, Beard.com, Paragon.com, MostWanted.com, Beth.com, LiveJapan.com, BusinessAnalytics.com, Clearlake.com, Badger.com, Ambassadors.com & Mux.com. There are many more but almost all of these mentioned went to end users.
If we were able to report the sales prices for the list above, I can say that our sales this past 12 months would rank above ALL of the top 20 spots on DNJournal’s Year To Date sales chart. So yeah, we’ve been busy!
Elliot: What are some domain industry trends you are noticing?
Andrew Rosener: I think one-word brandable .com domains, real tier 1 grade names, are possibly the most undervalued assets on the planet right now. I think we are facing a potential exponential value correction (upward) over the next couple of years on these names. Things like Jet.com, Dragonfly.com, Home.com, PX.com, MJ.com, Box.com, Rain.com, Apple.com, Amazon.com. These types of brands are going extinct! There are only a handful of top domain investors who truly grasp the enterprise value of such a domain. They are quietly sitting and waiting for the World to catch up.
About 40% of our business is domain acquisitions for startups. Everyone wants the same thing! They want a generic one-word .com that is general enough for a pivot, easy to spell, shorter the better & has a positive ring to it. Well let me tell you, those are getting real hard to find! Harder to find than a burrito in Rome! If any of the new gTLD’s do catch on with end users, as a company name & brand, not just marketing & advertising campaigns, it will be 100% because we simply run out of amazing .com domains. We’ll see whole companies acquired soon only for their name. Because the domain is more valuable than the business that owns it.
Elliot: What does it take to be a professional domain broker?
Andrew Rosener: I think its really important to differentiate the types of brokers we have in the domain industry, because consistently people just say “domain broker” as a blanket description, which it shouldn’t be. Regardless of which category you fall under, you need grit, determination, the gift of gab, discipline and a lot of empathy.
You have guys that are focused on the wholesale market, running newsletters, wholesale marketplaces, auctions & just straight up Skype and chat hustlers. These guys are deal makers. This is how I started out. We still run our newsletter and are actually working on some cool ways to better leverage that. Our domain sales newsletter is probably the longest single owner newsletter in the industry (I think that is probably a fair & true statement, no?). Its a good way to start out, more of a trader really. A matchmaker. But it is getting very crowded. You scrape all day long for small margins but do a higher volume of deals to make up for it (they hope). But you build a network, a reputation & trust. Lot of respect here, this is where you cut your teeth and build thick skin.
Then you have sales people, account managers and sales managers that manage inbound leads for client’s domains, or owner operated domains. There is a strong degree of customer service involved primarily. Different organizations call this role something different. Some would say inside sales, some would say customer service and some would say broker. I think the primary differentiation is the compensation package. They manage inbound leads via phone & email, leverage a CMS to persistently manage those leads and negotiate offers which come in. But little or no outbound solicitation and sales. Very little competitive bidding process to get the highest possible price. To me, a broker creates demand. A sales person, makes sales.
Finally you have the broker; who is doing the outbound sales, solicitations, marketing & broad communication. Creating demand out of nothing but relentless persistence, insight and intuition. This is where we are primarily focused these days. I like to say that our job is to create liquidity in an illiquid market. Our sales process is highly structured, intensive & effective. We are building curated hit lists of anywhere from 50 – 200 different qualified buyers for a particular domain. We don’t just email the WHOIS or hold our nose and guess, we identify the appropriate decision maker at each company. Then we go out and hammer the pipeline for months on end in most cases until the right timing emerges with the right buyer; that’s when the magic happens. We are dialing for dollars and sending emails all day long. I believe Chris sends 200 – 300 emails per day. I used to do 500 points of contact per day (phone and emails) when i first started out. Now we have built a steady pipeline and we are able to plug in premium domains into our domain sales life cycle consistently and effectively.
Elliot: What are you seeing in the new gTLD aftermarket space and what are your short term predictions for selling new gTLD domain names?
Andrew Rosener: I have to say that we have had very little action in the gTLD space aside from acquisitions for clients directly from the registry in most cases. We have acquired some interesting new gTLD domains for ourselves, but primarily either defensively or just for speculation. But on the brokerage side and especially the end user side, I actually couldn’t tell you any sales we have made. I think we have a few actually but none come to mind immediately.
The good gTLD domains that I would be interested in trying to broker are not priced realistically in my opinion. I think pricing is the greatest flaw to the whole program. Pricing should be standardized. If professional domain brokers like myself are confused by pricing, how do you think consumers feel? How about the guy trying to manage a companies domain portfolio to protect their IP? Its a mess.
My short term prediction is that it will become more of a mess before it gets better. I think that 5 years from now great and memorable new gTLD domains will have value, less than .com of course, but value, just like any great and memorable domain name does. There will be some degree of liquidity and some degree of wide consumer recognition. But only the real cherry stuff is worthy of any investment because the premise of the whole thing is to eliminate scarcity. Eliminate scarcity and you have no resale value because your domain is only as valuable or as good as the next best alternative. The difference in value between Common.Online and Common.Web is negligible. But the difference in value between Common.com and either of those two is light years apart.
Thousands of companies and investors will try to get a new gTLD extension in the 2020 round. Probably 10X or more of who applied in the last round. But at the consumer level I think .com is where to be if you want to be.
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