Thoughts on domaining

[estibot.com]

I'd like to hear your thoughts on the current market, and on domaining in general.

Thought I'd write down some of my thoughts to start the discussion.

I started domaining last summer, so I'm a rookie. I've built a portfolio of >500 names since then. Of course, initially I regged some really silly names (russianoil.biz anyone?), but I've learned something on the way (in big part thanks to you, fellow NPr's - a great community). Lately I've been very, very selective about my regs, treating each like it was a big purchase.

So here's a review of my short career.

Almost all of my names were reg fee grabs.

I've sold 5 names, biggest sale being $300. The others mid-high $xx. All on SEDO.

I've received offers of $500 on two other domains. Did not sell at that price.

Basically I've spent about $9,000 on names, and received offers worth about $1,500 so far.

All offers were for .com domains.

Only about 10 names are earning their renewal in PPC revenue. Most of these are single-word (IDN) dotcoms and single-word .ccTLD.

Type-in traffic for .us names seems to be increasing a bit.

I've had various names on brokered SEDO auction, but no offers (they had a $xxx reserve).

From my experience thus far I conclude that I will be dropping a lot of names come this summer, and will sell most of my names at a low price instead of risking having to renew them.

Instead of regging masses of names, I will be focusing on buying premium names and trimming my portfolio down to a few dozen high quality names.

I am now using only the sales proceeds for regging/buying new names instead of investing more money.

I am of the opinion that the .us market will surpass .de and .mobi in value, and I believe the .mobi bubble will burst as the iPhone and other applications will render such a TLD unnecessary. Also I see many businesses entering the mobile market with business.com/mobile instead of .mobi.

The .us zip code project is a wonderful development, and will do a lot to promote the .us cctld. I think that websites dedicated to local area information are going to thrive in the near future.

Interest in .info names seems to be increasing. I hear a lot of .info sites advertised in radio commercials etc.

In some countries, .net is more popular, and more valuable than .com. If you are buying cctld names, take a close look at the market - in europe, people are using .cctld primarily, in some countries .net and .info are more valuable than .com. From a SEO point of view, .cctld is also better - Google.de will rank higher deutschland.de than deutschland.com assuming all other factors are equal. Google assumes that .cctld has more relevant information for searches within that cctld.

Globally, and especially in the US, as long as the Internet as we know it (navigation by domain.tld) exists, .com will be the Beverly Hills of tlds. Just about any nice sounding .com has some potential - the question is whether it is financially feasible to hold on to (and renew) 500 speculative .coms in the hopes of hitting it big with just one or two.

The future of domaining, IMO, is in development. Ideally, I'd like to have a few hundred nice names, and develop functional, nice-looking, informative sites for all of them, do some SEO, and see what type of revenue this model would bring in.

I have developed about 15 of my names. All of these are now earning their own renewal, and then some. One site is earning mid-high $xxx per month (heavy development - domain is 3 yrs old), most are earning low-mid $xx per month, with minimal development.

Well, thanks for reading, these are just my thoughts as a newbie in the game, I may be wrong about .mobi of course and I wish everyone the best of luck with their names, regardless of tld.

Your thoughts/advice/words of wisdom very welcome

 

[hugegrowth]

A well thought out post, shows that you are treating this as a business and not doing things off the cuff.

I've often wondered about what's better, having a large portfolio of names bought at reg fee that you hope will sell, or a small portfolio of quality names bought in the aftermarket.

My order of preference is:

.com - hard to reg decent names now, but still worth keeping an eye out for new trends and terms to reg. .com is always the best to have.

cctlds's - whatever country you live in, the cctld is the next best. for some reason it hasn't caught on big in the US, but probably only a matter of time. you can still get decent one, two and three word terms in cctlds, and they are cheaper to buy in the aftermarket. a good way to target a certain country or language.

.org, .net, .info, .mobi - if it fits the extension these can be good buys. I think .mobi has a future but am tired of elaborating on why. .info is showing up more in ads, especially related to travel and 'subject' type terms that people want to know more about.

IDN's - but you have to know what you are doing, and it's hard for most english speakers to start speculating in asian idn's. many asian countries don't have much internet commerce yet so they are hard to monetize. mid to longer term there will be a return here, and sooner for more developped countries like japan.

all the others are highly speculative, and involve more risk.

Domaining is still a new industry, and many small to medium businesses don't even have a website. I think one day most people will want to own at least one domain, maybe for a personal page or business page. There are adults, kids, and people not even born yet who will need domains - what will be available when they are ready to buy?

I compare it to large cities - say 100 years ago you could have bought land around any north american city for cheap (by todays standards) in what would now be the inner core. As land gets bought and the city develops, it spreads out farther and makes the rural areas and farmland more valuable when housing projects start up and more people move in. Certain areas become more valuable, like waterfront, near parks, or areas with views. It is a similar evolution with domaining, choice domains being bought up and more people coming in needing domains, pushing up values all around for anything decent.

 

[Web Master]

hugegrowth said well.

 

[cache]

good post.
Sometimes, I find it is hard to drop your names if they are not performing. Emotion could be the factor, they are the names you picked earlier and after a year the traffic start picking up. So it is very hard
not to renew as you go through the list over and over again.

 

[hugegrowth]

Many names I renew don't make me any income, but to me they have value for one reason or another. Either I'll sell them in the future, or build a site one day. Even if you renew a domain for 10 years in a row, the cost is only around $75. It doesn't take a high sales price to get that money back, plus a little more.