I've got an average two word name that I registered 7 years ago. I guess that means my investment is around $70 so far. I've decided that I ought to sell it, but I'm reluctant to take a notional loss. I doubt if the name is worth more than $100. Godaddy values it at $1,494, and states this justification "Valuable keyword: name is a high value keyword that has an average sale price of $2153."
My record in selling names seems to be consistent underselling. So, do I try to sell it to the traded for a few hundred, put it up for auction, or list it for $1,500 and accept offers.
This is a general question, as I must have a couple of hundred names like this.
Interesting question.
First, about GD valuations. I have seen few guys mention that their STR for names valued by GD under $1400 tend to be drastically lower. So some elect to blank drop those as overall the category loses more than it makes. I haven't done my own analysis for this, but have seen many great names undervalued by GD. My guess is that this works, because GD generally gets the low value for "badder" names right, so, as a result names under $1400 are overrepresented by worse names compared to $1400+.
$1494 is a little higher than that threshold, so the chances that it is an ok name are higher (without knowing the actual name).
Second, my approach to the situation is to never look at the investment in domains on per name basis. I do my analysis on the basis of hundreds or thousands (even when I have just handful of a specific subcategory).
So, let's say I have 1000 of those names. How much I paid in renewals doesn't matter. Some are 10 years old, others are few months. Renewals are just part of annual opex and have nothing to do with an individual name.
Let's say you price those names at $2000 apiece, sell 1%, i.e. 10 sales, for $20000 revenue, minus $1500 commission. You get $18500 and pay $10k in renewals.
The only time you want to go granular analyzing each name is if you have identified additional facets for the category that could determine that 1% STR is not uniform and there are, e.g., 200 names from the 1000 that have STR of 0.5% (note: this is why all this analysis works in thousands or tens of thousands way better, as with hundreds one or two fluky sales throw everything into a disarray). In that case, you just liquidate those at bargain or just drop (as I do).
