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| As a writer I'm always looking for a good metaphor. Hurricane Frances, which hit our home state of Florida this past weekend, provides a good one for what we have seen in the domain market this year. Sales activity got stronger and stronger throughout the year, then as we reached the end of the summer season last week, the eye passed over and it became eerily quiet. That ended this week as the sales winds picked up again and buyers literally flooded the market. |
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GreatDomains reported the biggest buy, collecting $40,000 for Claims.com. Chad Wright was right behind after selling SinglesTravel.com for $35,000 in a private transaction. It was a big week for Chad who was also part of a three-way tie for the third position after DCJobs.com earned him another $30,000. DotcomAgency.com and Sedo.com also hit 30K head on. DotcomAgency.com did it with WebsiteDevelopment.com. If that one looks familiar to you, it should. It appeared on on our Top Ten last month when DotcomAgency's Ian Andrew bought it for $10,000. Less that 30 days later, Kevin Carney from Websitepros.com came calling with enough money to make a quick turnaround well worth Andrew's time. Sedo's share of that third position is also an interesting story. They tuned in their 30K with a two-letter .tv! CN.tv did the honors and accounted for the highest .tv sale that has been reported to us to date (eclipsing the $20,000 sale of Plasma.tv in May). The hits just keep on coming. At #6 you'll see my personal favorite, Band.com at $26,000. Having spent many years in the music business the potential of a name like that makes me drool (good thing we write on computers these days, otherwise you would be looking at a very sloppy paper)! I caught wind of this sale in a thread at the DomainState.com forum where Innovation HQ Inc. mentioned they had sent the domain to Shuki Haiminis of HaiminisHoldiongs.com (who in turn confirmed the price to us). The domain already gets nice traffic (393 in Overture with the extension), but a name like that begs to be developed. There's still more where those came from, but let me give you a look at the ten best sales reported to us this week before continuing our look at the week that was:
As we continue to run down the results from this week's action you can see Enom's Club Drop took 2 of the final 4 positions on the big board with FreeVideo.com at $21,607 and LastMinuteTravelDeals.com at $12,007. You might recall both of those from last week's Pipeline section of impending deals. GreatDomains put a second entry on the chart with Ribbon.com at $15,000. Sedo also scored two adding Zecken.de ("ticks" in German) at �10,000 ($12,181). Sedo had another five-figure sale that just missed the Top Ten (only the second time a domain in that range was left off the chart). That was Ibar.co.uk at �6,500 ($11,610). They sold the same name in .tv (ibar.tv) for �2,000 ($3,572). Sedo is the undisputed king of country code sales. Their list also included Clubber.de and Crawler.co.uk at �5,000 ($6,088) each. Of course, they do just fine with .com too. Sales in that extension included Empyrean.com at $5,600, Masymas.com at �3,800 ($4,628) and Strass.com at �3,200 ($3,898). Germany's .de ccTLD accounted for a couple of other notables - Kliniksuche.de ("clinic search" in German) at �3,600 ($4,383) and HeavyMetal.de at �3,333 ($4,058). Sedo also sold a .info at close to $5,000 but we'll save that for our New TLD section coming up a bit later. Enom's Club Drop seems to be getting an increasingly large portion of the high quality names in the expiring domains market. In addition to their two Top Ten entries this week, they sold NationalAirlines.com for $9,307, Twenty.com for $6,600 and UsedMobileHomes.com for $6,507. Others on their list of completed transactions included HomeMortage.com (misspell) at $5,307, Arabalar.com at $4,500 and UsedVans.com at $4,200. If you checked here last night for our usual Tuesday night update, you know we ran into a 24-hour delay this week. Many of our top contributors are located on Florida's East Coast - ground zero for Hurricane Frances. Afternic.com and Moniker.com/DomainSystems.com both had their power knocked out, so we waited another day to try to make contact with them (as well as contributors elsewhere who were out of their offices Monday for a national holiday in the U.S.). We did hook up with Afternic who had the week's best .net sale, RYL.net at $9,450, plus a pair or notable .com's; CanadaMed.com at $5,000 and PointHotel.com at $2,888. We also finally reached Moniker's Monte Cahn but his crew (half of whom still had no power in their homes) was still busy getting their office back up to full speed. We are just thankful that all of our friends and colleagues in the stricken area got through unharmed.Elsewhere, out of harm's way, Snapnames.com picked up $7,600 for PerfumeSpot.com and $2,175 for Posing.com. DotcomAgency.com supplemented their Top Ten entry with RealEstateInternational.com at $2,700 and WebcamSingles.com at $2,600. Pool.com was unusually quiet this week. The only significant confirmed sale we heard about was WebDesignTalk.com at $2,000. Too early to tell if that was an anomaly or a sign of discontent with the company's recently enacted two-stage auction process (a system that is getting roundly criticized in the domain name forums). Rewind: We just got word this week that Spanish.com changed hands for six figures last month. Vertical Axis bought the domain from Rick Latona of Dollars.com. Neither party would disclose the exact selling price but Latona confirmed that it was a $xxx,xxx sale and indications are that it cleared the 100K mark with a lot of room to spare. We have added the sale to the footnote section of our Year To Date chart where major confirmed sales without exact prices are listed. Pipeline: It looks like we could see another very big week next week. We have a report that Ocelot Ventures of Brooklyn, New York has purchased Bodyguards.com and SecurityGuards.com for a total of $80,000. Those will be charted next week if we can confirm the information. Paraguay's Chris Chena is also at it again (adding to his Spanish keyword collection). He told us he has paid $30,000 for Cocina.com ("kitchen/cooking" in Spanish) and is waiting for the transfer. We may also see our highest confirmed .cc sale to date. Afternic said a $3,000 transaction for Ambition.cc is in escrow. Payment has arrived and if the funds are confirmed the transfer will take place to complete the deal. An auction for Cellphone.cc also ended at Afternic at $2,500 but had not yet been paid for at last report. ***** Our Year-To-Date chart welcomes five new roommates this week and expands to 60 positions. Claims.com moves in at #30, SinglesTravel.com ties for 38th and that new trio of $30,000 sales joins a six-way logjam at #48. Here is the complete rundown of big winners so far in 2004:
Business was good in the new extensions this week too. Six of the seven chart entries hit four figures, led by KFZ.info at �4,000 ($4,873). Conventional wisdom holds that 3-letter new TLD domains with seldom used letters (q, x, y & z) are of minimal value. However, there are exceptions to every rule and this is obviously one of them. .Info enjoys its greatest popularity in Germany and KFZ is the widely used abbreviation for "car" (kraftfahrzeug) in that country. As it usually does, .info dominated the New TLD chart again this week, taking 6 of 7 positions. Sedo, also as usual, was the dominant venue, also taking 6 of 7 slots. German terms in .info swept positions 2, 3 and 4 before .Biz crashed the party at #5, thanks to the $1,100 sale of Imagine.biz at Sedo. Produktion.info ("production" in Germany) took the runner-up position at �1,250 ($1,522). The only non-Sedo entry on the chart was #6 AromaTherapy.info which changed hands for $1,000 in a private sale. Here is a look at all of the reported new extension leaders for the week ending Sept. 5:
We've noticed that German buyers are less put off by hyphens that the average American buyer as you can see with #4 Romantik-Hotels.info at �950 ($1,157). There seems to be a never ending battle over whether hyphenated domains help search engine position enough (or at all) to offset the fact that many surfers forget to type the hyphen in. Our Year-To-Date New TLD chart gets a new member this week with KFZ.info entering the list at #23. It's the second 3-letter .info to make the chart, joining HMS.info (the year's third best seller). Here is the list of top new extension sales through Sept. 5:
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]. We truly appreciate the industry leading companies represented on our charts who share their sales information with us to help everyone in the business get a handle on current domain values. Individuals like Richard Meyer of the American Marketing Corporation also 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 2004
Domain Name Journal
A Division of
Internet Edge, Inc.