Yea.net launch: 100% accurate domain name valuations and 0% commission sales

[fka1080405]

("Yea" is read as "yay", it is the word for an affirmative vote used in oral voting, the opposite of "nay")

tldr: domain name owners don't want to know "in theory, how much can I sell my domain for someday?" they want to know "how much can I sell my domain name for today?". I have built a marketplace that brings together buyers and sellers to determine how much a domain name is worth today.

Yea.net is free to use and has zero commission on sales. Please sign up, submit your domains, values, and let me know what you think. Promo code NAMEPROS gives a lifetime 25% discount on any subscription. Or, read on for more details...

Background

I have been thinking a lot about domain name valuation. As an asset class, domain names are very illiquid and therefore almost impossible to value. Even the best appraisals (whether automated or human) are based on a theory about a buyer that might someday come to exist, yet out of the 500,000,000 domains currently registered, less than 1,000,000 are ever likely to find a buyer.

The fundamental challenge of domain name investing is that most domains will never find a buyer because nobody on earth is willing to spend any money on that domain. I doubt that can be changed. I think there is, however, a significant opportunity to improve the way that we value domains that someone does want and is willing to spend money on. I think that there are lots of opportunities to improve how we value the domains that people want and bring liquidity in the process.

Concept

Yea.net uses a timeboxed valuation process where every value is also a binding 24 hour offer to buy the domain name at that price.

1. A user starts a new Valuation, e.g: "example.com" for 72 hours
2. Users submit Values for the domain: each Value is an amount the user is willing to pay for that domain (valid for 24 hours following submission)
3. At any point during the Valuation period, the owner of the domain name can choose to sell the domain name
4. At the end of the Valuation period, all Values are used to determine the final "Yea! Value™" of the domain

Marketplaces are hard to get right, they need participants on both sides to work. Buyers have an incentive to submit Values because they have the opportunity to get a great domain at a great price. Sellers have an incentive to run Valuations because they get clarity about how much their domain is actually worth (and have the opportunity to sell their domain if they wish to). And yea.net directly incentivises participation with credits: users are awarded with credits for every Value they submit, and users are charged credits to submit a domain for Valuation.

Values and Valuations are anonymous, each user has a unique identity in the context of a Valuation. Anonymity helps ensure that the value is based on the domain itself, rather than the buyer (or seller).

Features

The primary interface for interacting with yea.net is designed for highly efficient submission of Values. Values are submitted inline, it takes just a single click to submit a "nay" ($0) value.

As a domain name owner, you can keep track of all of your Valuations and the best active Value in one place.

Coming soon

• Search filters to ignore domains you've previously valued and find domains based on criteria (pattern, dictionary words, extensions)
• Search notifications to be notified as soon as a new domain meeting criteria is submitted, e.g: instant notifications when a new LLL.com is listed
• Configurable Valuation notifications will allow subscriptions like "notify me of all new Values over $100" instead of the current system which notifies via email of every new highest value
• Bulk submission of domains for Valuation
• Additional domain name properties like backlinks, rank, first registration date

Long term ideas

• Instant sell, as confidence is built in the system, I intend to look at offering an "instant sell" option where domains can be sold (to me) for their Yea! Value™ outside of a Valuation period
• Portfolio values derived from the values of all of the domain names owned by an investor, with as-close-to-real as possible

Development

I built yea.net myself by hand, line by line, pixel by pixel, over the last few months. The site is a labour of love, I've invested time into designing what I think is a marketplace with the right dynamics, and time into building an interface that I think makes it as easy as possible for users to contribute to the marketplace.

Name

Naming things is hard. The working name for the site was "zeros", the tag line was "how many zeros is your domain worth?" referring to significant figures (e.g: a domain worth $100,000 is "6 zeros"). My favourite extension for my own projects is .net so I acquired zeros.net earlier this year for the project. Then, I was on NamePros a few months ago and saw someone selling yea.net and I fell in love with it, abandoning the previous name. And now, I hope, this project can do the name justice.

I'm still not sure whether the name is "yea.net" or "Yea" or "Yea!" or "Yea.net".

--

Anyway, enough yapping. Feedback, questions, ideas, everything is welcomed and appreciated.

 

[Bravo Mod Team]

Yea.net uses a timeboxed valuation process where every value is also a binding 24 hour offer to buy the domain name at that price.

Very interesting.

You might consider a partnership with @RyanEwen's DigitalScrapyard.com.

That could be a nice synergy.

 

[Vertibox]

Your logo reminds me of Yahoo!

 

[Hashim]

Show attachment 288403

("Yea" is read as "yay", it is the word for an affirmative vote used in oral voting, the opposite of "nay")

tldr: domain name owners don't want to know "in theory, how much can I sell my domain for someday?" they want to know "how much can I sell my domain name for today?". I have built a marketplace that brings together buyers and sellers to determine how much a domain name is worth today.

Yea.net is free to use and has zero commission on sales. Please sign up, submit your domains, values, and let me know what you think. Promo code NAMEPROS gives a lifetime 25% discount on any subscription. Or, read on for more details...

Background

I have been thinking a lot about domain name valuation. As an asset class, domain names are very illiquid and therefore almost impossible to value. Even the best appraisals (whether automated or human) are based on a theory about a buyer that might someday come to exist, yet out of the 500,000,000 domains currently registered, less than 1,000,000 are ever likely to find a buyer.

The fundamental challenge of domain name investing is that most domains will never find a buyer because nobody on earth is willing to spend any money on that domain. I doubt that can be changed. I think there is, however, a significant opportunity to improve the way that we value domains that someone does want and is willing to spend money on. I think that there are lots of opportunities to improve how we value the domains that people want and bring liquidity in the process.

Concept

Yea.net uses a timeboxed valuation process where every value is also a binding 24 hour offer to buy the domain name at that price.

1. A user starts a new Valuation, e.g: "example.com" for 72 hours
2. Users submit Values for the domain: each Value is an amount the user is willing to pay for that domain (valid for 24 hours following submission)
3. At any point during the Valuation period, the owner of the domain name can choose to sell the domain name
4. At the end of the Valuation period, all Values are used to determine the final "Yea! Value™" of the domain

Marketplaces are hard to get right, they need participants on both sides to work. Buyers have an incentive to submit Values because they have the opportunity to get a great domain at a great price. Sellers have an incentive to run Valuations because they get clarity about how much their domain is actually worth (and have the opportunity to sell their domain if they wish to). And yea.net directly incentivises participation with credits: users are awarded with credits for every Value they submit, and users are charged credits to submit a domain for Valuation.

Values and Valuations are anonymous, each user has a unique identity in the context of a Valuation. Anonymity helps ensure that the value is based on the domain itself, rather than the buyer (or seller).

Features

The primary interface for interacting with yea.net is designed for highly efficient submission of Values. Values are submitted inline, it takes just a single click to submit a "nay" ($0) value.

Show attachment 288401
As a domain name owner, you can keep track of all of your Valuations and the best active Value in one place.

Show attachment 288402
Coming soon

• Search filters to ignore domains you've previously valued and find domains based on criteria (pattern, dictionary words, extensions)
• Search notifications to be notified as soon as a new domain meeting criteria is submitted, e.g: instant notifications when a new LLL.com is listed
• Configurable Valuation notifications will allow subscriptions like "notify me of all new Values over $100" instead of the current system which notifies via email of every new highest value
• Bulk submission of domains for Valuation
• Additional domain name properties like backlinks, rank, first registration date

Long term ideas

• Instant sell, as confidence is built in the system, I intend to look at offering an "instant sell" option where domains can be sold (to me) for their Yea! Value™ outside of a Valuation period
• Portfolio values derived from the values of all of the domain names owned by an investor, with as-close-to-real as possible

Development

I built yea.net myself by hand, line by line, pixel by pixel, over the last few months. The site is a labour of love, I've invested time into designing what I think is a marketplace with the right dynamics, and time into building an interface that I think makes it as easy as possible for users to contribute to the marketplace.

Name

Naming things is hard. The working name for the site was "zeros", the tag line was "how many zeros is your domain worth?" referring to significant figures (e.g: a domain worth $100,000 is "6 zeros"). My favourite extension for my own projects is .net so I acquired zeros.net earlier this year for the project. Then, I was on NamePros a few months ago and saw someone selling yea.net and I fell in love with it, abandoning the previous name. And now, I hope, this project can do the name justice.

I'm still not sure whether the name is "yea.net" or "Yea" or "Yea!" or "Yea.net".

--

Anyway, enough yapping. Feedback, questions, ideas, everything is welcomed and appreciated.

Very interesting concept, but unless I missed it, I can't see anything that would stop users from valuing domains low. There's a bit of a conflict of interest in potential buyers of the domain setting their own prices.

Your logo reminds me of Yahoo!

Agreed, I would get either a logo designer or just AI to generate a better one - even Atom and NameClub logo generators can do better. The current one looks too outdated.

 

[fka1080405]

Very interesting concept, but unless I missed it, I can't see anything that would stop users from valuing domains low. There's a bit of a conflict of interest in potential buyers of the domain setting their own prices.

The "value" of an asset in a traditional financial market is found at the meeting point between what people are willing to pay for the asset, and what people are willing to sell the asset for. Domain names aren't fungible so it isn't possible to do that exactly, but what we can do is find the lowest possible value of the domain using the highest amount someone is willing to pay.

With that in mind, the amount that any one market participant is willing to pay for a domain isn't important for the final price. There are many reasons why I might not be interested in a domain, from the domain itself (maybe I don't like .example domains) or because of personal circumstance (I might be cash poor) so we can't read much into a single value. Rather than offer the option to "skip" or "ignore" a domain, or tell people to make their "best" offer, I designed the system with the ambiguity of "value" in mind. People are encouraged to submit values for every domain, even if it's $0, or $1 or $10, as long as it's an amount they're willing to pay, because that's the only thing we can actually control.

If there is someone willing to pay $1,000 for example.com then the market value of example.com is at least $1,000. I think there is a bunch of interesting possibilities around market depth (e.g: if 100 people are willing to pay more than $1,000 for example.com, maybe that's a "stronger" value than if only 1 person is willing to pay more than $1,000?) and I'd love to do something with that in the long term, but for now, I figure a simplified version (just using the best (legitimate) value) should at least prove if the concept has legs.

So, people are encouraged to submit as many values as they want, high or low! If you are only willing to pay $100 for tofu.net (which I paid $5,000 for) then you're encouraged to submit a $100 value. As the owner of tofu.net, I have no intention of accepting an offer of $100 but it's still useful data: it shows that tofu.net is worth at least $100. And that's where, I think (hope), yea.net can provide value to the domain name world. Until now, we've had barely any data to help discover values. Appraisals are fiction, and sales data is only useful for the tiny number of "liquid" domains (e.g: LLL.com).

If you're an investor who wants to build a portfolio of great domains, then submitting $100 as the value on an LLL.com is mostly pointless because nobody is going to sell an LLL.com for $100 but if you're an investor building a great portfolio, you might take a chance with offering, say, $5k, on the off chance that the owner is in a cash crunch and needs any amount of money now. $5k is probably an amount that multiple people would offer though, so maybe you should offer $6k? And that's how I think (or hope) the value will be found.

I initially thought about describing the "Yea! Value™" as a "floor" or "liquid" value but I felt that was a bit too in the weeds, and didn't leave room for evolution of the calculation, but that's ultimately what it will represent: it's the lowest guaranteed amount of money that the domain could sell for immediately.

For domain name owners: you get lots of data about what people are willing to pay for your domain, or, your entire portfolio. Submitting all of your domains for valuation would be a great way to find out what the true floor is for your portfolio, which is helpful when negotiating end user sales. e.g: if you've got a portfolio of 100 domains and each of which has a Yea! Value™ of $1,000 then you know that an end user offer of $1k or $2k or even $5k isn't a good deal to take.

For domain name sellers: your domain is put in front of many potential buyers, who are competing against each other without knowing what each other are offering and without knowing whether you are desperate to sell or not interested in selling at all.

For buyers: you're able to find domains that might be for sale and make offers on them that fit with how you value the domain. You can make offers that might seem too good to be true but if the domain's owner is desperate to sell, and you make the best offer, you could get a great domain at a great price.

Anyway, long comment. I have no idea if this concept will work in practice. I have no expertise in financial markets, I'm just a person with a keyboard, but I'm hopeful.

 

[fka1080405]

Your logo reminds me of Yahoo!

I started out with the concept of a check mark as part of the Y:

And I hired a designer to turn the concept into something real and they came back with this:

but I didn't like it, it didn't capture the friendly vibe I wanted, it feels too corporate, so I went back to trying myself:

I felt like it was too front heavy without the exclamation mark, and felt like the checkmark went too far when it covered the whole of the y:

And so that led me to the final logo:

I don't hate it but don't love it either. I agree with the Yahoo resemblance. I like the concept of a checkmark as part of the y, hopefully that'll survive, but I plan to hire another designer to take another shot at making a logo.

 

[alcy]

man tis is bad

1. yea is read as yeah
not as yay

2. all appraisers are shit. useless worthless trash. garbage. all of em. not just yours. but yours too.

3. If u get us all free fee sales then 1 and 2 will be forgiven unto yea

 

[alcy]

oh and hitme up if u wanna buy yea,vc

u know grand protection and shit lol

 

[Simon SE]

It's a valiant effort, but you'll need to convince a few well connected industry experts to try it, and iterate based on their feedback.

And that's going to be tricky. Build a community around it and you could have something - but it's going to be tough.

 

[byte]

Really neat concept, try to snag the .com version!

 

[Simon SE]

I can't see anything that would stop users from valuing domains low. There's a bit of a conflict of interest

I think this is valid.


Had a closer look. There's a few domains on there that I feel are probably decent end user value, but its not what I would look to pay as an investor. Its better for me to pitch lower as a buyer. But that is going against the ethos of more accurate valuations. So its all a bit convoluted. Not sure how you'd fix it. It feels flawed.

 

[Future Sensors]

What's the "100% accurate" thing about in the title?

 

[Future Sensors]

You might consider a partnership with @RyanEwen's DigitalScrapyard.com.

Not sure if that's a compliment. They are not in it for the long run.

 

[Future Sensors]

A mod asked me to explain.

https://www.namepros.com/threads/dnwe-com-does-it-anyone-use-it.1270914/#post-9507688

 

[fka1080405]

Its better for me to pitch lower as a buyer. But that is going against the ethos of more accurate valuations. So its all a bit convoluted. Not sure how you'd fix it. It feels flawed.

That's not the intent, I want to encourage everyone to submit values for as many domains as they can. The value isn't what you think the domain is "worth", they're not appraisals, it is the amount you're willing to pay for the domain today. If you don't like a domain, or you're not currently buying domains, or you would only buy the domain if you could get it for a bargain price, that's still useful information to have.

If you are only willing to pay $10 for dnwk.com, even if you think someone else might pay $250 because it's an LLLL.com, then you should submit a $10 value. The problem with appraisals is that they're big numbers based on a theory about what someone else might pay someday, whereas yea.net is actual amounts people are willing to pay today. The yea.net numbers will be smaller, but it's real amounts.

I guess, put simply: I think it is more useful for a domain name owner to know that there are people willing to pay $100 for their domain today than it is to know that someone thinks that someday someone might pay $10,000 for the domain.

What's the "100% accurate" thing about in the title?

I wasn't sure how best to communicate in a couple of words that this concept is distinct from appraisals. "100% accurate" valuations is my best effort. An appraisal is a finger in the air guess at what someone might pay someday which is very inaccurate (how many domains sell for the amount they were appraised at?) whereas every value on yea.net is "100% accurate" because it is an amount of money someone is willing to pay for the domain today.

The language definitely needs refining. The feedback in this thread so far has been helpful, I think it has demonstrated that my current language for the concept isn't clear enough!

 

[biggie]

Hi

willing to pay vs actual amount paid,
how do you enforce that commitment?

imo…

 

[Eric Lyon]

2. all appraisers are shit. useless worthless trash. garbage. all of em. not just yours. but yours too.

 

[Hashim]

Gene Wilder is still the greatest Wonka there ever was.

 

[fka1080405]

Hi

willing to pay vs actual amount paid,
how do you enforce that commitment?

imo…

I do not think there is an incentive to submit values that aren't backed by a willingness to buy the domain at that price. That said, there is a moderation system (which checks values for reasonableness and flags for human (me) review if they look suspect) and there is a policy in place for banning users who do not follow through with values that are converted to sales.

Here is an example email notifying of a new value with that outlined:

And when clicking on the "Sell anonymizes.com for $355" button it is reiterated:

My hope is that yea.net will be valuable enough that a small number of bad actors will not harm the system's usefulness, instead, it will be a minor annoyance. I hope that over the long term, as the system gathers more and more data, it becomes more and more accurate at catching bad actors before they cause annoyance.

For example, if a domain has received 100 values between a minimum of $0 and a maximum of $500, and then a brand new user submits a value of $10,000 for that domain, the moderation system can see that it is an outlier and needs human review before sending the value on to the domain's owner. The human review step involves reviewing their account (have they got multiple accounts? are they someone known to invest in high value domain names?) and reaching out to them asking for evidence that they intend to pay $10,000 for the domain.

NamePros experiences bad actors from time to time, but the feedback system and proactive moderation minimizes the harm. The value of NamePros far outweighs the annoyance of dealing with those bad actors when they haunt the website. My hope is for yea.net to benefit from the same.

--

The current system isn't my initial design, I iterated on it a bunch to get here. I initially considered whether users should have to subscribe a paid plan, verify a credit card or even pay a deposit to submit values. I concluded that would be far more harmful than beneficial. The most efficient market is one with lots of participants. Easier to submit values = more participants = more accurate. And bad actors are less impactful when they're drowned out by good actors.

Early on, I thought that domain owners should be able to "reject" or "counter" values. I also started out thinking that when submitted, a value should be valid until the end of the domain's Valuation period. I quickly realised that was difficult to understand, and would disincentivise accepting a value early on, so it evolved into a fixed 24 hour expiry on values.

I expect that the system will need to evolve more over time, there will definitely be things I've missed or things that become evident only after use.

 

[Vertibox]

I want to congratulate you with coming up with this idea, all by your lonesome.

I think it has merit and I like the thinking into the various aspects/possible issues, as you have outlined them here.

You deserve all the success that I am sure is coming.