thought I’d throw in my two cents on the state of the domain name market. It’s a small microcosm of the rest of the industry, but I think it speaks volumes where this market is (and where it’s headed).
On 3/15, I was in NameJet attempting to win the domain TourismOfIndia.com. It got a bit out of my price range, though, so I passed. It ended up selling for $8,888 to bidder ‘ amitabhbachchan’.
Curious to see what the new owner would do with the property, I continued to visit the domain every other day. And each time, I’d find nothing.
After a few weeks passed, I was surprised to see the name re-enter the auction process at NameJet (guess the original buyers flaked). The new auction completion date was scheduled for 3/31.
I watched again. I bid again. And the domain jumped out of my price range again. Like any second round auction’s I’ve typically seen in the real world, or online, the second go-round price tends to drop a bit from the original sale.
Guess what? The darn thing sold for *more* on the second go-round.. $9,100 to be specific, from a bidder who was silent during the first auction (alias is ‘vanuatu’).
how’s that for proof of a strong domain market?
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 10th, 2008 at 5:08 pm and is filed under Domaining. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
I’m not going to argue with you per se, but I think this is fairly anecdotal, being a single instance and all. However, I do see this as market validation for the price range of that particular domain, seeing as it sold second time for quite close to what it did the first time.
I’m guessing that what such a high price for this domain is not the strength of the domain name exactly (not that strong, IMO), but the fact that it had been a developed site since 2001, had a number of high quality backlinks built into it (with impressive traffic stats), and had an Alexa ranking in the mid-400,000s. Pre-built traffic is worth paying for indeed.
It’s also interesting how quickly the new owners developed a site for the domain, considering that Ron Jackson recently reported at DNJournal that of the top 100 domains purchased in year 2007, only 30% or so are now developed into websites (or something along those lines) . Now, this site is not a super robust development job, but hey, it’s a heck of a lot more useful than a basic parking page - and I’d bet more lucrative as well. Will check into what tools they used to build that thing, so thanks for bringing this to our attention. In the end, it’s development that fleshes out the true value of any domain.
Thanks for the post!
Bob Amend
“it’s development that fleshes out the true value of any domain.”
I couldn’t agree more..
-peter
The domain has a nice Google pagerank of 5, and lots of returns in Google. Must be getting traffic right away.
I have known that the domain name $ value is increasing daily as many more people enter the domain name market.
The domain name owners that can hold on to their domain names and not sell them in the next 2 years will be able to sell them for a GREAT PROFIT (two or more words domain names will be sold for a minimum $10 thousand).
To YOUR SUCCESS
Hi Peter,
cool post and - WOW, what a layout! Love it
Cheers,
“The Dumb Domainer”