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After three straight weeks of charts topped with six-figure sales, things settled back into a more normal pattern the past seven days. That might be because a lot of the movers and shakers have gone to Rome for this week's ICANN meeting. The possibility that WLS will be approved there is enough to temporarily turn anyone's attention away from the business at hand. |
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There were two other five-figure deals this week. MessageBoard.com went for $15,000 when the buyer and seller hooked up in a sales thread at DNForum.com. The domain was sold by the Outboxes.com Network to NetTuner Corp. (a company that shares our hometown - Tampa, Florida). Sedo accounted for the other five-bagger, doing it with a .co.uk (UK country code) as GrowingBusiness.co.uk went for �5,900 ($10,951 at today's exchange rate and a bit higher at the time the deal was completed a few days ago). Sedo wound up taking half the slots on the new Top Ten and did it with a variety of weapons, including .coms, .net, .de and the .co.uk mentioned above! They actually shoehorned two domains into the 10th position after LC.net and HealthFirst.com each went for $5,000. Here's the Big Board with all of the top reported sales for the week ending Sunday, Feb. 29:
We didn't see a lot of high numbers at Pool.com
this week, but they certainly rang up a lot of sales in the mid
four-figure range. In addition to their two entries on the Top Ten,
they logged $4,100 for FinancialSecurity.com, $3,300 for
MobileTelephones.com and $3,100 for CruiseLocator.com.
Pool's other notables included Mask.net at $2,750, ZDZ.com
at $2,600 and one that's a real mouth full, DiscountAutoInsurance.com
at $1,842 (great product line but where can you find business
cards that are 8 inches wide?). Three-character .coms are starting to show occasional signs of life again after falling to pocket change levels over the past three years. Pool got $2,950 for RX8.com (of course this one has some special meaning as the model number for a Mazda automobile). A couple of weeks ago 80K.com went for $4,500 at DomainSystems. We certainly wouldn't call it a trend yet but it merits watching. Before we get out of the Pool, we should also note that ElectricTools.com drilled a $1,605 hole in the buyer's wallet at the popular auction venue. The story at Afternic.com was similar to Pool's: a good week of mid-range sales. Campesinos.com ("farmers" in Spanish) went for $3,488 while LoveGifts.com and Certificate.com each fetched an even $2,000. In my opinion, Certificate.com at 2K was the best buy of the week. RCStuff.com went for $1,088 (RC is short for radio or remote controlled, very popular with hobbyists). Monte Cahn told us CarrRacing.com just crossed the line at $3,400 at DomainSystems. We found that one a bit surprising with the extra "r" in there, but a search of Google shows a bunch of different people named Carr in the racing business. There is always an angle we manage to overlook! At NameTower.com the motto seems to be "why sell one domain when you can sell ten!" That is exactly what they did in working out an $18,000 package deal with busy buyer Alex Lerman. His grab bag included Begging.com, Districts.com, Does.com, Lately.com, Lumps.com, Merits.com, Prisms.com, Shortcake.com, Sidetrack.com and Townships.com. I gave up math as soon as I met the minimum requirement in high school, but without even consulting a calculator I know that averages out to a respectable $1,800 per domain (OK - so I double checked the calculator just to be sure)! In The Pipeline: Last we heard bids had crossed $30,000 for XXXPics.com at Pool in an auction ending the day after our current reporting period ended. We'll see if that one changes hands in time to make next week's chart. Meanwhile FAQ.net continues to lounge at the Pool. The auction closed Feb. 17 but payment apparently never arrived as the domain has still not changed hands. Only one change on our Year-To-Date Sales Chart this week. Faces.com nosed its way into 8th position after that 38K+ sale at DomainSystems. After exactly two months of sales activity in 2004, here is how the leaders stand:
Sedo had better watch it or the Anti-Trust people are going to be on their case. They seem to have developed a monopoly when it comes to new extension sales. More often than not they claim all five spots on our New TLD Chart and this week is no exception. Some of that is due to .info and .biz enjoying their greatest popularity in Germany (where the Sedo organization is based)...and a lot of it is due to the hard work top executives like Tim Schumacher, Matthew Bentley and Daniel Law have done in spreading their brand around the globe. The company has always welcomed new extensions and country codes with open arms and they are reaping the benefits. .Info gets the lion's share of the limelight again this week, taking four of five slots. As on the main chart, pricing is softer this week than in recent weeks but we might have been due for a breather after the frenzied activity in February. Victims.info leads the way at $1,115, followed by Brautmode.biz and, just in time for this election year, the German word for weasel, Wesel.info! Here is how they stack up:
Though the last two sales on the chart are low value, I think the fact that they sold at all says something about .info. Most domain dealers would tell you names like MoonMist and Date4You wouldn't be worth much in any extension. The fact that buyers would even go to low three figures in a new extension for names as easy to construct as those is an indicator of willingness to use the .info extension even if other options are available. Along those same lines, a member at DNForum.com expressed amazement this week that sellers are asking (and sometimes getting) as much for 3-letter .infos as they are for 3-letter .nets and .orgs. Certainly the widely publicized buyout of all remaining unregistered 3-letter .info and .biz domains by Elequa has a lot to do with that, but buyers also have to be viewing .info as an acceptable alternative for that to be happening. We will be exploring the current state of the .info and .biz extensions in our next Cover Story, as well as what was behind Elequa's decision to make those massive buys and what it all might mean for the market. In the meantime, below you can review the Year-To-Date new extension sales leaders. The Big Apple still reigns at #1 on this chart:
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.