This .com Domain Name Drops 96.7% In Value. Why?

phonemarket .com is currently listed for sale for $5,888.

phonemarket .com sold for $180,000 in March 2012 (on Sedo)

The current sale price ($5,888) represents a 96.7% loss in value over seven years. A loss of this magnitude spooks serious investors and can damage the credibility of the domain name industry by highlighting volatility and irrationality. What happened? What caused this domain name to suffer such a dramatic loss in value?

 

this domain i am watching since last 3 months approx owner is chinese malaysian and also own phonemart //com i offered for both names but he rejected ... he own great names with 1 3L.com as well
Sedo sale is suspicious to me.. but who know...

 

It's because the domain industry is starting to hit a tipping point. Most domains are sold between domainers not end users. Meaning, you have too many sellers and too few buyers. Thus, driving down the price. The domaining industry requires a constant influx of new domainers to keep this system going. What will eventually happen is, most domainers will be stuck with overpriced domains that they can't sell or will have to heavily discount their prices in order to sell to end users.

 

Looks like it's been "for sale" ever since 2012 when it was bought: https://web.archive.org/web/20140415000000*/phonemarket.com. The whole thing looks a little.. well... I wouldn't base the state of the industry on that

 

No investor in any industry is going to care about a single transaction that can't even be fully trusted.

Don't take this the wrong way, but you registered a few months ago .. and in all that time you've only made 2 posts, both of which subtly hinting towards impending doom for .com. I have to ask .. do you work or own a ngTLD registry? lol

Beyond that .. this really is no news ... PhoneMarket.com is a very good domain .. but never was a $xxx,xxx name in the first place. Even if someone bought it for that much, it was way oversold and had no chance of reselling for anything close to that amount. $6k actually sounds about right for the value of that domain .. I'd probably price it a bit higher .. but most certainly nothing close to $xxx,xxx.


#NothingToSeeHere #MoveAlong

 

$500

 

The volatility and irrationality in this market is not restricted to one or a few transactions.

What happens when opportunity cost -associated with legacy top-level domains (e.g., .com, .net, .info, etc.)- is ignored?

Buyer pays $188,000 for Crystals.com.

Crystals.app is available for $220 per year.

It would take 854 years of .app registrations (@ current prices) to match the cost the buyer apparently paid for Crystals.com.

Another example of how status quo bias favors .com top-level domain. A prodigious percentage of people still believe #dotcom to be the only viable #TLD choice out of 1,200+ other options.

This false premise of .com supremacy creates an illusion of scarcity which in turn artificially drives up the price for .com domain names –on the secondary market– at the expense of all other TLDs.

No, I do not work for (or own) a ngTLD registry.

 

Worth 5 figures. May even sell for 6 figures again. It is a solid domain, but will be liquid below 4 figures, and gas below 3 figures. People who post wanted ads with big budgets might be interested at the current price.
When the asking price is low, buyers may think the seller is desparate, and hope price may go even lower, and wait instead of buying. Maybe making an auction is the solution. There is a global liquidity problem. 20 years ago US would print money and lend it to the world. Right now China doesn't allow it to happen. So people don't take risk. But if you are a business, you should get the right domain and pay for it, because you can cover costs.

 

Not at the expense of other tlds exactly. If there is no special tld, then almost no domain would be worth anything, except a few pefectly matching new tlds. But making a war against .biz was totally unnecessary. There are many 2 word german .biz domain sales in 5 figures. If such sales continued, then this would be good for .com as well. If Amazon was allowed to get business.biz then maybe .biz would replace .com just after dot-com bubble crash. (but then everyone would say it is unfair). Creating new domains was, I think an alternative to printing cash. Same for cryptos. You can't print cash, but you can take it from others by printing cryptos and tlds. This doesn't mean cryptos and new tlds don't have a future.

 

The 2019 market is a very different market to that of 2012. A 2012 valuation may not make sense in 2019 and some valuations still don't make sense.

Regards...jmcc

 

please don't FUD when it's not true...

 

Definitely not ... and there are likely plenty more big losses that you will find out there. But if you look at the market as a whole, for every one such example, you'll find 100 more of big profit sales.

What happened to the price of Champagne when the world realised there were better and cheaper grapes to make sparkling wine all over the world? It's branding was/is so strong that it didn't lose any value at all.

That's the irony of the domain game. For the most part domains are about branding .. and in fact the .com "brand" is probably one of the strongest brands in the world.

You say blabla.com anywhere in the world and 90-99+% of people will know you are talking about a website. Repeat the same experiment with blabla.app .. you won't get anything close to that.

In fact, I have my first name in .org ... and even myself who has been a domainer 2-3 years and owned domains/websites for much longer have sometimes sent documents to myself incorrectly at the .com! lol

For the company that can afford Crystals.com, chances are that owning the front-of-mind best domain name is worth vastly more than what they paid for the .com.

You've actually made my point for me. The technicalities don't matter .. good brands and in turn domains are acquired to market a company's product or services. Marketing is all about illusions. In almost every industry consumers pay a premium for a multitude of reasons on established or illusionally better brands. Do you really think a Gucci T-Shirt is still worth $400 if you remove the logo?


Yes .. some day altTLD's will become more established and recognised by the general population .. and at such a time while .com will still be more valuable because of the trust factor, the delta in price between .com and everything else will close. By how much? Who knows .. in fact .. it might not even be about .com really dropping much, but more about the others increasing.

There are too many variables to really give absolute predictions, but today .com while technically not very different from other TLD's, still is an astronomically superior "brand" than any other altTLD.


There is another reason why other gTLD's haven't taken off .. and that's a consequence of globalisation. In that while 50 years ago you'd have a bunch of companies called Acme all over the world. Today it's really about standing out from the whole rest of the world ... so if there already is a strong ABCXYZ company presumably already on the .com .. then nobody is going to want to be known as ABCXYZ .. making all the other gTLD's effectively useless.

Obviously there are plenty of exceptions and subtleties. Most importantly there is some demand for secondary gTLD's .. but in the world of first-to-market .. that also includes being first on a brand.

 

wtf is a phone market?

imo...

 

Online only brandable? Basically, 2010-2014 was when a lot of the kited and Domain Tasting domain names were coming back into circulation after the domain drought caused by tasting and kiting. I think that Google had been playing with its algorithms and ad feeds around the same time.

Regards...jmcc

 

The business of buying and selling phones was way bigger in 2001-2009.
It doesn't exist nowadays.
It used to.

 

You could build a strong business on it, but it isn't a heavily searched term so value is derived more from the brandablity rather than it's potential SEO advantages.


I'd rather own Smartphones.com or UnlockedPhones.com.

I also agree with this and would like to add the fact that Amazon probably killed many such businesses.

 

Also before you had no reason to keep a phone once you were done with it. You'd just sell it and it was very easy to find a buyer.
Now phones are like personal computers with photos, apps and emotional connections, people don't sell them as easily once they get a new one.
$300 was the price of a very good leading edge brand new phone in 2005. New phone with new features all the time, it was too tempting to sell for $200 and upgrade. And there was so many good brands nokia sony ericsson motorola with so many good models.
Now it's all samsung iphone.

So no serious phone market anymore.

 

Don you don't get phone market?

https://www.facebook.com/phone.markett/

https://thephonemarket.co.uk/

Brick and Mortar store here Louisville, KY Address: 2201 W Broadway, Louisville, KY 40211

https://www.gsmarena.com/premium_ph...it_despite_declining_shipments-news-37671.php


https://swappa.com/

https://ipphonemarket.com/

PhoneMarket .ext registered in 36 extensions.

PhoneMarket.com sold twice, no one mentioned the $1,500 to $180,000

cellphonemarket.com 115 USD 2017-07-25 GoDaddy
phonemarket.com 180,000 USD 2012-04-11 Sedo
phonemarket.com 1,500 USD 2011-09-05 Sedo
cellphonemarket.com 2,350 USD 2011-01-19 Sedo

If it was a legit sale, the owner now is the owner who owned it back in 2011 after buying it on Sedo for $1,500, Whois History proves that. Calvin Gan and his WebHouse owned the domain before.

Now the buyer may have been Phonemarket.com Limited https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/10100620

Off the specific target I would say a popular product ending in market is not a bad brand.

692
Total Sales
$1.7m
Dollar Volume
$2,453
Average Price
$9,887
Standard Deviation
$100
Low Price
$180k
High Price

 

Not just online John, there are businesses named Phone Market, one in Lousiville Here Address: 2201 W Broadway, Louisville, KY 40211

 

nope

some names just don't appeal to me... but do to others
I wouldn't bid on it or backorder it

imo….

 

Oh I would not pay $180,000, I would have taken it for $100. The sales data and usage shows that would be a profitable investment.

Thanks for the reply.

 

The franchise operations from the telcos have edged out a lot of the small businesses in the EU that were selling mobile phones prior to 2006, Raymond.
They either became branded shops for the telcos or they went out of business.
It would be a good name but tricky to defend as a service or trademark.

Regards...jmcc

 

Yeah too generic for that, there are no trademarks for "Phone Market"

 

I'm not sure that using .APP in a comparison is a good thing. The .APP is a niche gTLD with minimal usage. The .COM is global with decades of recognition.

Regards...jmcc

 

You won't find any serious buyers in 2019. No ones prospering, it's a dying activity and that's why it's for sale so cheap despite being a popular product ending in market.
You'd be outbounding to small hustlers who'd pay a lavish maximum of $1000.
I don't see it ever selling again.
A burden to own.