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It was another week of solid sales for the domain industry. No eye-poppers but from top to bottom the numbers on our new Top Ten chart look healthy indeed. There were four 5-figure sales that we were given the green light to report and three more we couldn't put on the chart because the parties involved requested the details of their transactions be kept confidential. |
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Sedo had another one that was even bigger than that and they were allowed to report landing it. A 3-letter British country code domain, BES.co.uk, went for �10,000 ($18,331 at the March 9 exchange rate) to nail down the #2 slot on our new chart. It's interesting to note that there are three 3-letter domains on the Top Ten in three different extensions this week. Maybe Thunayan K. AL-Ghanim (Elequa) knew exactly what he was doing when he bought up every remaining 3-letter .info and .biz domain last week (more than 7,000 domains in all). Sedo wound up having a great week all the way around, claiming six positions on our Top Ten and just as they did last week, they hit their high marks with a variety of extensions including .com, .net., .de and that big .co.uk. After the #3 domain, Supernova.org at $15,000 (in a private transaction), Sedo took five of the seven remaining positions with Pool.com accounting for the other two. Let's take a look at all of the top reported sales for the week ending Sunday, Mar. 7 then we'll add a few more comments on the individual domains:
That $15,000 sale of third-ranked Supernova.org represents a high water market for .org in 2004. The buyer is a guy who turns up frequently on these pages, Christian Chena. He told us Supernova gets thousands of unique visitors a week, making it well worth his 15K outlay. Sedo notched the chart's fourth 5-figure sale after attracting a $10,829 bid for eTracker.com. There is a segment of the domain community that thinks "e" prefix domains are out of date, but I'm pretty sure the bank will still accept the cash from this sale! Sedo's #5 domain Kalender.com, fell just $166 short of giving them a five-figure trifecta on the chart. Sedo is always good for some strong .de sales too (German country code domains). This week SSV.de and FirstMobile.de shared the #7 position after going for $7,381 each. Pool's best sellers were bunched in a solid four-figure range this week. It addition to their two on the Top Ten, they scored with HighYield.com at $5,403 and Hooligan.com at $5,000. Pool also has three big sales in the pipeline as you will see below. Another one worth noting from the shallow end of the pool was NewPets.com at $1,595. Afternic had quite a variety of sales activity this week. In addition to their chart topper, NQ.com, they sold a package of 19 "personals" domains for $3,800. These were all .coms that followed the cityname/personals.com form. For example, AtlantaPersonals.com, MiamiPersonals.com and DenverPersonals.com to name a few that were in the mix. Afternic's other goodies included Slipstream.com at $1,600, RecycleMarketplace.com at $1,500, BulkSpices.com at $1,400 and CampaignWorks.com at $1,288. Afternic also had a nice 3-letter .org sale with DAI.org going for $1,000. They scored on the New TLD chart too (more on that coming up a little later in the article). We just got through mentioning last week that we were seeing signs of life among 3-character .coms again (domains combining letters and numbers). This week more evidence comes from Adam Woeger's $3,200 sale of M4A.com at DNForum.com. M4A is short for the rapidly emerging new MPEG 4 Audio format. Sometimes you really have to stretch to make something meaningful out of a 3-character domain (as opposed to three letters) but this was one of the few that was a perfect fit right out of the box. A couple of other sales to mention involve .TV, the Tuvalu country code that Verisign is marketing globally to try to cash in on the reflected glow the extension gets from being the acronym for television. We have word of our first notable .TV sale, Spanner.TV which went for �700 ($863) at Sedo. Not sure what to make of that (except that Sedo could apparently sell ice cubes to Eskimos)! Of course you know what they say about bugs. If you see one in the house there is always another one. Sure enough, right after we got that sale report we heard from Afternic that they had sold Intel.TV for $260! I'm spreading the .TV bait around right now to try and stop this before it gets out of hand! In The Pipeline: A
Pool auction for XXXPics.com closed at a whopping $32,000
March 1 but the domain has not changed hands yet so we will have to
wait and see if that one goes through. Another high dollar domain we
have been watching there, FAQ.net, never did change hands after
receiving a high bid of $14,500 back on Feb. 17. Pool
also attracted a $10,000 high bid for UQJ.com in an
auction that ended Monday Mar. 8 (the day after our current reporting
period ended). That's a high price for such an unattractive letter
combination so it will also bear watching to see if the buyer is for
real. For comic relief, there is currently an auction on Ebay
for AMPMAmerica.com
with a $1.5 million dollar minimum bid and a bid has been
placed! What do you think the odds are that one is legitimate? And
people wonder why the domain category on Ebay has a reputation for
shill bidding. Rewind: We got late word of a decent sale at BuyDomains.com. We don't hear much from that venue because the company has a policy against releasing sale prices. In this case, buyer Don Marks contacted us to let us know he had acquired TheHomeSource.com there for $2,800. Only one change on our Year-To-Date Sales Chart this week. NQ.com took up the 15th position after that 27K sale at Afternic. We added one slot to the chart this week to keep all of this year's $20,000+ domains in clear view. Here are your leaders Year-To-Date:
.Info leads the New TLD chart again this week and it's not surprising to see a German word holding the #1 slot (Germany has been the most enthusiastic backer of .info with 22% of all .info registrations coming from that country). Hochzeitsseite.info (German for "wedding site") went for $1,478 at Sedo to easily outdistance runner-up Slovakian.info at $523. A .US pops up on the chart this week at #3, followed by two more .infos. Here's the new leader board:
When I saw Hochzeitsseite.info had gone that high I did a little checking and was surprised to find that the English version of that domain was sitting there unregistered (a situation I quickly remedied). I've never been a big fan of domains with the word "site" in them (feeling that was an unnecessary filler word), but in this case the word is actually an integral part of the product. Having gotten married long before the Internet was even a gleam in Al Gore's eye, I didn't realize that the marketing of personal "wedding sites" had become a nice business, serving as high tech wedding albums for many couples. A quick visit to Google and all of the ads for the product there quickly brought me up to speed. Now I know just what to give as a wedding gift the next time a friend gets married! My personal experience with .info continues to be very rewarding. I just sold another one today (just under four figures) that has started its trek through Escrow.com. That one should hit the chart in a week or two if all goes well. With no blockbusters this week our Year-To-Date New TLD chart remains unchanged from last week:
As always, we welcome all verifiable sales reports from companies, private sellers or individuals with knowledge of an important sale made through any channel. To contribute information and help make this column better, just drop a note to [email protected]. People like Richard Meyer provide invaluable help by sending us data for these sales reports each week. Every Tuesday we publish the highest reported domain name sales for the previous week. On Monday our contributors send us their sales data for the previous 7 days. We then compile that information and write this report for Tuesday publication to give you the freshest sales report in the industry. We will close with this standard caution. These are not average selling prices - these are top selling domains. One of the biggest impediments to making sales is pricing domains at unrealistic levels. For most of us, pricing domains at the levels achieved on the Top Ten chart will leave us waiting a long time to make a sale! We hope you will use the information presented here as a measuring stick that will help you price your domains at levels that will put more money in your pocket more often! Editor's Note: If you wish to review previous Domain Sales columns, they are available in our Archive. |
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Copyright 2003
Domain Name Journal
A Division of
Internet Edge, Inc.