What Is Your Worst Domaining Story?

[bonavee]

In 2012, I listed about 200 domain names on GoDaddy and Sedo. A few were sold as expected. However, 2013, 2014 passed by and 2015 came in. I was in the process of changing my website's ISP and just decided to re-read some e-mails. Lo and behold, I saw a notification from GD regarding an offer for my domain name in the online graduate degree niche. The offer was for US$1,200 and the GD e-mail was mid-2012! The one that got away... oh what a miss! How did I feel?

 

[catchmesleeping]

A couple years ago, when I was very new to domaining, I listed a bunch of my names onto the major marketplaces (Sedo, GD Premium, and Afternic). One day, around 6 or 7 months later, one of my names sold for $500. At the time I was a bit excited, because I had actually hand reg'd the name, and so it was a nice return on investment. It was great to have a sale and some money, but I really had a nagging doubt that maybe I priced it a bit too low. The domain was a generic tech name for a kind of database technology.
Less than 2 weeks later, I opened up Hacker News, and there was my domain name at the top of the list! It turns out Microsoft bought the domain name, and their new product was an exact match for my domain name.

From that time forward, I've been much more thoughtful when I price my BINs. I always ask myself now "at what price should I price this, where I would have no regrets, if the same situation happened".

 

[ezcoms]

I registered a name of a strip club that was on a movie (obviously a fake name.) I priced it too low on the Godaddy market "buy it now." I was contemplating making it a dating site, or something with good content. It sold, and the person also bought all the extensions and trademarked the name and opened up a strip club in Las Vegas with the name. I probably could have made thousands, but, I ended up with $140.00 or something.

And a mistake was buying the $100.00 .CM domains. What a waste.

 

[AEProgram]

Was monitoring a name for years using gd (not a gd name) and finally I got alerted its in pending delete. I submitted the name to all the popular catches at the time except one that I simply forgot, sure enough that catcher caught it. I remember hoping that maybe that catcher caught it for one of the catchers I submitted too, but nah, some guy got it and hopefully within the next few decades ill get another chance at it

 

[GoKaizen]

Too many to list. Learn from your mistakes, try to not focus on the past.

 

[bonavee]

...I remember hoping that maybe that catcher caught it for one of the catchers I submitted too, but nah, some guy got it and hopefully within the next few decades ill get another chance at it

Decades? Okay buddy, don't worry... as long as there's life, there's hope. I love your sense of humour

 

[accuname]

I sold AgingGuide.com on ebay for maybe $30 or so back in prob '10. In 2012 it sold for 2.3k.

 

[BrandChimp]

Using 1&1 was my worst mistake.

 

[CamMK27]

There are too many to list, but in a nutshell here is my short story.

Back when I started in 2007 I hand registered many domains, close to 2500 lol.. So in those days I was reading Frank S' blog and in one of the posts he mentioned "Pro Domainers don't sell their domains". Thinking that I was a pro I didn't sell a few domains that I had offers for. One was .us extension and someone offered me $700 I counter offered $2500 and never heard back. Two offers were .coms and I didn't sell. So after 3-4 years of renewing close to 2500 domains and depleting my savings, maxing out credit cards I started to drop many which included those 3 as well as many others that I could have sold and recovered at least a good portion of the losses I had from renewing all those domains.

After dropping, many of them were listed on HugeDomains for sale ranging between $1600-$2800 and it's quite possible they sold a few. Many others have websites on them so basically a lot of them were used by End users. Looking back at the list I realized that around 500-800 could have been sold for $100-$250 and a few dozens in the range of $500-$2500.

So even with the 1000-1500 crappy ones I still had close to 1000 decent ones and had I sold them I would have made 2-4 times more than what I invested.

Here is one of my hand registered domains that I dropped. CreditCardBond . com - possibly could have sold it for $x,xxx. It didn't sell for 2-3 years and then the F****** built a site on it after the year I dropped lol...

Well you live and learn

 

[AEProgram]

There are too many to list, but in a nutshell here is my short story.

Back when I started in 2007 I hand registered many domains, close to 2500 lol.. So in those days I was reading Frank S' blog and in one of the posts he mentioned "Pro Domainers don't sell their domains". Thinking that I was a pro I didn't sell a few domains that I had offers for. One was .us extension and someone offered me $700 I counter offered $2500 and never heard back. Two offers were .coms and I didn't sell. So after 3-4 years of renewing close to 2500 domains and depleting my savings, maxing out credit cards I started to drop many which included those 3 as well as many others that I could have sold and recovered at least a good portion of the losses I had from renewing all those domains.

After dropping, many of them were listed on HugeDomains for sale ranging between $1600-$2800 and it's quite possible they sold a few. Many others have websites on them so basically a lot of them were used by End users. Looking back at the list I realized that around 500-800 could have been sold for $100-$250 and a few dozens in the range of $500-$2500.

So even with the 1000-1500 crappy ones I still had close to 1000 decent ones and had I sold them I would have made 2-4 times more than what I invested.

Here is one of my hand registered domains that I dropped. CreditCardBond . com - possibly could have sold it for $x,xxx. It didn't sell for 2-3 years and then the F****** built a site on it after the year I dropped lol...

Well you live and learn

I think he means exceptional domains not just any domains. Kinda what Warren Buffet says about stocks, never sell, he obviously sells stock but he is referring to exceptional stocks.

I do get your point thou, and I think ebay and np is a good place to list names you plan on dropping as making 10 bucks is better than 0.