Times have changed. We don’t need your money. We have options. Today, in all reality, when dealing with top domainers it is all about the domain owner’s position and needs then the domain itself.
Now here’s a question. If a holding company owns a beach front property, would you walk in and tell them “You guys don’t use the property, how about 500$ for it?”, or maybe “Can you transfer ownership to me?”. So why in the world would you do it with just as valuable (and sometimes more valuable) online properties?
So here’s how it looks from where we stand. In the time we’ve been in the business we have sold no more then 10 domains total. Amount of inquiries? literally thousands if not tens of thousands so far. How many inquiries we actually replied to? less then .1%
I don’t know if RE holding companies go through the same thing but I would think not, because it isn’t as easy to contact them as it is to click “send” in your email program. Maybe one of these days people will understand better but here’s something to know: if you do send an inquiry and it goes unanswered, it is more likely that your inquiry came across just like any other Jane and Joe then the intended recipient didn’t read your email. And if you think you are the first to contact that domain owner, if it is a good domain, think again. People have already automated the process and literally every owner of a good domain already got many inquiries for their domain/s. Luckily for you, most of those were still tire kickers.
The bottom line, if you want a response stop insulting us. We’re not your average business owner and we really do not need your business. I can’t tell you what to write but I can tell you what doesn’t work, and coming to us and saying things like “Parking sucks, I want the domain for pennies” isn’t cutting it.
And why not sell?
Sahar, Don’t tell me you are the Eistein of the domains and that each domain you purchased was a great deal.
Like all the domainers you have a good percentage of names that finally are generating “very low revenue”.
I will say that what happen to you is that you are making so much money that you do not want to spend time with small sales and for the big ones you want to keep the names. This is why you only sold a dozen of names in your domainer life
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What happened is that we did not build a business based on one domain, we built a business based on the business itself, which is a PORTFOLIO of domains which was based on type-in traffic, not on sales. Back in the early days we decided sales are extra and we will not be based on that, it was one of our very best decisions. The question to me today is how a certain amount effects either my lifestyle or the business. In most cases there’s no effect, and with no effect, there’s no REASON to sell, and there is no sale.
Domains are like real estate in yet another way, all the money is made on the buy and then it’s collected on the sell.
If you find a buyer that is willing to “Collect” less than you think the name is worth, then you’ve found a steal!
I do think that the Traffic angle makes things very difficult for a buyer that can’t see traffic and earnings of a domain.
* My favorite emails always are ” I had this domain valued at *insert auto-evaluator company* and they said its worth, $250, so I’ll offer you $300. My response always is, “did that company take into account that this name generates $xxx per year in revenues?”
Keep hunting for those deals!
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“Make Money When You Buy” - totally agree. The thing to remember is this is mainly a perspective issue and isn’t a multiple issue. Rick S. bought Property.com and when first plugged it to PPC it was like 100+ ROI. Today, couple of years later, it’s less then 8 years.
This is just such an insane topic - it really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense - if you want to do nothing with the domain - that’s fine. If you want the domain to resolve to an error page… and make no money on traffic - that’s GREAT! Do I think it’s silly that you’re not trying to turna profit? Absolutely… would I do that and just leave it sit and rot? Not a chance - either I’d develop it or use it to park pages… either way I’d do something.
HOWEVER ——>
This is just such an insane topic - it really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense - if you want to do nothing with the domain - that’s fine. If you want the domain to resolve to an error page”ฆ and make no money on traffic - that’s GREAT! Do I think it’s silly that you’re not trying to turn a profit? Absolutely”ฆ would I do that and just leave it sit and rot? Not a chance - either I’d develop it or use it to park pages”ฆ either way I’d do something. But then again it’s not mine to say go or stop with then is it?
HOWEVER - - > this is the beauty of the internet - put an offer out to buy someones domain if you really want it. Occassionally i see something not in use and i put out what i feel is a friendly email - asking if it’s for sale - and if so what amount - dude I’m the last person on thsi planet who can put value to a website - again i’ve been doing this for 3 months - and i know what i like and what i feel i’d pay for something - but there are people out there in this vertical who are playing right now who can tell you what that site will make, it’s actual worth, etc. i can’t do that… i just like to be (what pittsburgh folks call) NEBBY! and i’m curious at what price ranges but when someone puts the email back and i’m thinking… wow maybe they’d sell this for $15k and they send me something back telling me $1mil. well then… either i can play ball at that amount - or shut my mouth and take a walk… even though i may think that person is smoking crack at that price - it’s not my place to get jive with them. it’s up to them to figure out how many heads of lettuce they’re interested in takin for it… if any… maybe that site is sentimental… maybe they have a partner and can’t sell. many different reasons. again that is someone elses property - and to my knowledge i don’t think there is “eminent domain” in the e-world… yet… that is.
Bottom line is though - there really is no place to put out profane or nasty emails/letters to anyone. you’re never going to pick any fruit off of that tree. also who cares what you do with the domain - you bought it - you own it - it’s yours - not mine… if you wanna plaster a picture of a donkeys turd on there - so be it… that’s YOUR choice… you own it. I mean I would hope you’d have good taste if it was something relating to minors or children… but seriously - it’s no ones business whether you develop or don’t develop or whether you use for good or evil… that’s what lawmakers are for. beotch to your congressmen, your reps - you’re paying for these folks. help build legislation if this is causing so much mental durress on your life that you literally have come down with the shakes, can’t eat, can’t sleep, have become impotent, etc… I mean i’m all for people contacting me with some of the little domains i have… it’s a nice way to start networking with people whom you may never have gotten to talk too… and/or vice versa. i think the line is crossed when you start telling people that they have to sell for low prices or the threat and bullying. there is no place in any industry/vertical for that.
in RE: to the einstein of domaineers comment - dude is that comment really necessary first off? and second - you were so quick to offer up your prognosis - are you the industry genius?… i mean who cares whether he or anyone else sells his domains. it’s in his posession - he pays for the yearly lease… thus it’s “his” business what he wants to do with it. my god… how friggin hard is this for anyone to understand - if something is not yours - then you don’t control it!!!
i can’t help but just add this tidbit… back when the ‘net first came to be (for me that is - in 1995)… both me and my best friend figured out a way to make some incredibly sick amounts of money… quickly… and did it for a little while working sometimes 3 days straight before we got sleep… and through whiney little snots upset with nothing more than that we took the initiative and were out hustling and beating the internet-streets to make cash - put a stop less than 2 years later in what we were doing.
all because people got upset that we were making money and broke the walls down in a tight knit clique - not because it was illegal - the govt turned it illegal. i’m a law-abiding citizen - i wish i wasn’t but i am… and this all came to a head and we chose to do the right thing and go back into corporate america for a little while…
but again - people putting their nose where it did not belong - they had no interest let alone a vested interest in what we were doing. hell - they weren’t even involved other than ti made them sick that 2 young guys were working hard and got themselves out of the crap hole they grew up in. So I have to think that a lot of the folks out there that beotch that you should be developing websites instead of parking them - F-that… that’s nothing more than misery loves company. go buy your own websites or domain names and/or quit laying around doing nothing other than trying to bring others who are making something of themselves down…
i’m done - my apologies on the long winded rant!!!
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Good comment my friend. Curious what it is you guys did? hint hint?
I spoke yesterday to a friend and he said some guys in the poker industry are suffering because the new laws, so my response was, they had the ride of their lives on something that wasn’t there few years ago. Nothing to cry about really and because it was since day 1 a grey-ish industry at best (where most money is usually being made quick), then the trick is find the right timing to get out and get into the next big thing.
I have few friends who have done it many times over. When adult was hot and grey (96-99) then adult was it. When poker started to take off (2000-2005) then Poker was it. I’m highly curious to know what they do now!
So the question yesterday was why I’m not involved in these and it’s just that it doesn’t fit my character, who I am. I rather build long term businesses, and today, I’d rather do it with an angle of social responsibility.
**Rick S. bought Property.com and when first plugged it to PPC it was like 100 ROI. Today, couple of years later, it’s less then 8 years.**
Regardless of the multiple on this one, a little SEO (like was done with creditcheck.com/Site_Map.html prior to sale) and you could drive plenty of traffic to property.com. $750,000 was a steal! =)
we were never interested in poker or sex sites… i love to play poker but poker-sites and so forth never appealed to us and sex-sites … we were in our early 20’s and my buddy “T” had 4 kids already… his wife is extremely religious and that wouldn’t have flown over well - it was just not for us - and we did at one point have a HUGE opportunity to make a lot of money in that vertical (sex/porn) - we both passed on it.
for me - i had a hard enough time convincing my family that i made honest money on the internet - i still remember my dad at christmas pulling me downstairs at my uncles house with about 5 or 6 of my uncles who were all pi$$ed off - and they sat me down to talk to me about “selling drugs”… my dad said he was upset that i would lie and treat them as if they were stupid and idiots and that i needed to get my head screwed on straight before i got the $hit beat out of me for lying (mind you i’m in my early 20’s at this point living on my own!!!) - my lies about where i was getting this money from to live on was getting old… i had to actually SHOW him what i did and even then they still thought something was fishy… that’s how far back this goes! i mean he still couldn’t comprehend - none of them could that anyone could/would/will ever do well with thing called the internet… i also fought daily with my mom over this. she was convinced the only way anyone could make that kind of money was through either hard back breaking work (physical labor), a harvard education or of course… selling drugs on the streets of pittsburgh!!! lmfao! coincidentally i’ve never touched a drug in my life…
anyhow we tried to think outside of the box actually - those were crowded fields (sex/poker and a few others) at our time - we liked “simple” “easy” and we did what most poor pittsburgh boys do… “follow the $$$$$” we sadly enough equated a $ amt to our time. our friends would kid us about that. at a time 2-3 years P.P. (sorta like AD & BC) this refers to Pre-Paypal…
our friends would laugh hysterically at what we did… i mean we quit good management jobs that we worked hard to get to pursue this (coincidentally people didn’t know EXACTLY what we did just that we were working on the internet - I didn’t want people knowing exactly what I did for fear others would get into it and i liked to just do my own thing) until one day a few buddies had stayed at our apt for a bachelor party - people were drunk and waking up late - well i woke up and i would go and get the mail at the post office - the mail man would not bring it because it was too heavy and they would always have it in a big box… and when i came back i did what i always did (every mon-sat) … i dumped a giant box of letters onto the table. these guys were eating breakfast and started laughing at me and T asking about our “pen-pals”… until i started opening up the letters and they saw how many letters and each letter had a check or CASH in it. thats the day the laughing ceased, the jokes stopped, and in our little circle we became immortal… about 2-3 days later you would have sworn we were having high school cheerleaders in catholic skirts wash cars in our alley - we had peoples cars lined up blocking the alleyways all the way down the street, to see this amazing box of letters that rolled in each day containing checks… everyone was going to get computers and get on the internet after that… 
figured i’d share that little story of aggravation and hell we went through and hopefully someone can get a little bit of a laugh or chucke it’s funny lookin back on it now…
by the way once PayPal came to fruition it was like the heavens opened up… i mean not all at once though - again we milked that out and really used it to our advantage - i credit the fact we came from nothing and when you come from nothing you speak up, you do things that most people won’t do, you don’t care about looking like a fool because you know deep inside you will succeed or you’re going to fail - either way F-it because you know what the dirt tastes like and it sucks…
you’re dead on though with that’s where money is made every day - the bulk of it! in the grey areas… there is no “case-law” or precedence for lack of a better word for anyone to govern. what we did - didn’t hurt anyone, it wasn’t sex-laden at all, and to be honest was a SERVICE that mainly a giant demographic out there wanted… we catered to them. It surprised us that we started to pull in others… adn even others. And how quickly it was possible to go “global”.. we got so big and i wound up learning HTML at night to make some basic web-pages so we could get ourselves noticed even more.
so again you’re totally right - get in, make $, get out, move on to next big thing… put that on a t-shirt… ha!
there were so many other ways we looked into too at the time that we could have made money - unfortunately we didn’t seek out domain names - although we had registered quite a few - but we were registering things like “gazaggle” - we didn’t actually register that - just an example that we registered stuff that had NO value only to someone specifically looking for it which like was NEVER - and when i go back through the domain.whois … ugh… to look back and see what was around and when… ohhh lord!!!
but hey - someone else saw that - i give them credit - and whether you lucked into this field or not - most folks i read about had to front their own money - at a time when you were making next to nothing on the domains if anything at all. that’s why when people post things like “you should do this with your domain”… it just angers me to no end… it’s no ones business what anyone does with “their” property. people like that should be concentrating on finding something untapped, something new…
there’s always going to be money to be made in the online world - easier so than in the real world i believe/always much easier because things can be automated, you have access to instant audiences-on global scales, when you screw up you can start over and recreate without the giant hassles of manpower/buildings,etc… i’ve seen that over the past few years - that’s why i’m leaping back in here to try my hand at some different things.
the only last thing i can really add is - is that i wish no limelight was cast upon what we did - i wished that it just stayed this little underground type deal… but hindsight is 20/20. i guess nothing good or that’s gettin tapped stays hush/hush for long… there ARE other opp’s out there - you just have to look and be ahead of the curve… that’s a tough thing to do sometimes… but it can and is done daily… and to those who do it actively - i applaud them - they’re my heros!!!
i’m outta here… have a great weekend!
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Ah good read, thanks for that and have a great weekend yourself!
I think we can all remember a time before we were domainers and we hit up the whois and saw lots of domains we’d like to register, but didn’t. Back when I got on the Net in 1993 there was almost nothing registered yet, even though .com domains were FREE to register. I remember noticing home.com was available and thinking it would be great to have my email address as boris@home.com. I never registered it. I did register a bunch of .net addresses - only because no-one except ISPs were registering .nets at the time, and so it looked really “cool” to have a vanity .net address. Ah, for the love of foresight!
I still did make amazing money from the Internet in the early days. I saw a fad and rode it. I knew it would be short-lived, so I made as much as I could as quickly as a could. My friends would laugh, because I was selling Beanie Babies on eBay. They wouldn’t laugh so much when I’d pull out $5000 in cash from my pocket. One guy alone gave me $250,000 in cash for 800 of those crappy soft toys. eBay itself has the Beanie Baby craze to thank for it’s early success. Beanie Babies and pirated software were the main things on there back in the mid-nineties.
- Boris (Zombie)
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My partner saw cash.com was available, but he thought.. c-a-s-h.com looks nicer. Rest is history.
I got on the web in 96 and even then, it was still .net everything. Who would have thought..
Tomball,
LOL - You are right, the “Einstein” is a stupid extra in my post.
Probably due to my poor english knowledge (I am often sharp to express my thoughts) and teh fact I am fast to express my thoughs (when a responsable man should think twice).
I do apologize Sahar.
You are also right about the huge collection of factors that can be involved in a domain pricing, factors totally independant of the value of the domain itself.
This is why on my hand we have decided not give any money value to our valuations and just show domain metrics outlining the name quality.
Thanks to have share your experience Tomball, very interesting.
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