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The Ultimate Guide: How to Sell a Domain Name

June 26, 2018July 31, 2018 Doron Vermaat 4 Comments

Many of us have the habit of registering a domain name whenever we have a great (or not so great) idea for a new startup company, product, project, blog or side-business. But those ideas often remain just that, an idea. And the domain name will end up sitting dormant in your registrar account for months, years or even decades alongside an often growing family of other, unused domain names.

Other reasons for owning unused domain names could be that you retired from or closed a business, decided to stop updating your blog or personal site or you acquired other companies over the years, with their domains. If so, you’re probably wondering if these domains are worth anything to someone else and if yes, how you can sell your domain names?

How to sell a domain name?

In this post, I will guide you through all the different steps in the process of successfully selling a domain name. From valuation to pricing, marketing, listing, negotiating and closing a sale with a safe and secure way to transfer the domain name to its new owner and the seller (that will be you) receiving payment. You can use the links below to jump to a specific section. (more…)

Brandable domain name sales week 24 & 25: Bitbi.com, Zenus.com, Vedix.com

June 26, 2018June 26, 2018 Doron Vermaat 1 Comment

I don’t know if Rick Schwartz is living under a (golden) rock or perhaps he doesn’t read sales reports (can’t blame him if he doesn’t) but I just can’t agree with his statement that we’re in a “depressed market”. I can’t speak for the early years of domain name investing when investors could simply live off their parking revenues or that time when a lot of VC money started to flow into the world of technology around 2006 but in the ~5 years I have been active in this industry I have only seen prices for great .com domain names move up, year after year. Especially on the auction sites such as NameJet and GoDaddy where most investors do their shopping, prices are through the roof and have never been higher. Only a very small percentage of my portfolio (less than 10%) consists of GTLD’s and I have to admit I have not had a decent offer on any of them in all these years so I do agree with the rest of Rick’s post that most of the investors who went all in on these new extensions, especially those with the intention to hold on to them for the long-term are very unlikely to ever turn a profit, especially with the silent killer that renewals are. To sum it up, the market for GTLDs is depressed but the market for brandable .com domain names is 🔥🔥🔥 – if you ask me!

I’ll let this weeks list do the rest of the talking: (more…)

Domain Renewals: The Silent Killer

June 24, 2018 Keith deBoer 17 Comments

If you are buying domains and you say to yourself that you will hold it for a year and then decide to renew, you are buying the WRONG ones.
– Rick Schwartz

One of the great joys of domaining is waking up and seeing the words, Your Domain Has Sold!, in your inbox. There’s nothing better than earning several hundred, or even several thousand, dollars while we’re sleeping. But there’s another, more insidious, process that also occurs while we sleep. It’s the silent cancer that eats away at the money in our pocket and it’s called, domain renewals.

Every day the clock is ticking on the hundreds (or thousands) of domains we own. Renewal fees come due night after night. For every thousand domains in our portfolio the annual renewal cost is about $8,000 per year. That’s $666 per month or about $22 a day. Yikes!

With numbers like that we’ve gotta be careful and make sure our portfolio is a clean, lean selling machine with no dead weight. Otherwise renewal costs will eat our profits faster than an African tapeworm. So how do we avoid that?
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What’s Selling at the Brandable Marketplaces?

June 17, 2018 Keith deBoer 26 Comments

Do you like data? I do. In fact, I think I’m an information pack rat.

Because every time someone reports a brandable domain sale in a conversation, at a forum, in an email or even on a brandable platform itself, I write it down. I’m keepin’ a list. Checkin’ it twice. And trying to find out what’s hot and what’s not.

Over the past several months I’ve accumulated a log of 349 recently reported sales from three different brandable marketplaces. I’ve looked them over and here’s what I’ve learned. (more…)

Brandable domain name sales week 23: SportLine.com, CandyPay.com, DogWorld.com

June 14, 2018 Doron Vermaat Leave a comment

Marketplace Sedo closed some impressive brandable domain name sales last week with the $50,000 sale of SportLine.com topping the chart. The domain name currently redirects to a company selling horse riding apparel. Another noticeable sale was that of CandyPay.com which was purchased for $20,000 by Kaidianbao Payment Service Co, a payment company from Shanghai, China. DogWorld.com was an expired domain name up for auction at GoDaddy. The domain name was once owned by Dog World, a monthly magazine that was published from 1916 until 2012.