Less than a few hours later a reader noticed the domain name MediaLocker.com, which was listed on Afternic.com for $18,500 was purchased.
This illustrates the danger of pricing your domains and having them sitting out there when there is breaking news or new products announced they are certain to get grabbed before you have a chance to pull them off the system or increase the price to reflect the development.
As that same reader pointed out (Adam) that at Domain Fest I spoke about this precise issue.
While pricing your domains will increase the volume of your sales you have to be prepared to lose a big one when news or events break that makes your $18K domain a six figures domain overnight.
Unless the owner had had it listed up to Sunday at $1000…ouch!
Once you price the domain at Afternic are you locked into this price? Could not the owner have comeback with a counter-offer?
18k for medialocker is great.
They should buy it well before they announce anyways.
Unless they are stupid.
was it another domainer that bought it?
Dean/Gnames
If you have a buy it now price which is what you have by default if you price your domains, then the domain is a sitting duck at that price.
You do have a right to change the price but you have to be up, around and aware of the news or event which would prompt the change of price.
We do not know who the buyer was could have been Amazon or a domainer, guess we will just have to wait to see.
Name certainly is not great, and I take the flip side to this and want your opinion Mike. If a big company decided we don’t need the domain and launches without the name, Amazon knows they can market the product through Amazon.com, and an app store. So they pigeon hole the current owner, how will they develop the name in another way and want to compete with an Amazon product ? If they do the same product its a UDRP. What do you think about that Mike when its a big company that can get by without needing the name ?
The notion that the domain name in question was somehow worth xxx,xxx as opposed to xx,xxx is complete supposition on your part. As of this moment there is no way of knowing who bought the domain name and there is no way of knowing whether or not that purchaser or amazon themselves might have been interested had the domain name been 100K as opposed to 18K. Just because a company launches a brand it doesn’t mean that domain names that are reflective of that brand suddenly increase in value by 5-10x.
according to whois – Gregg Ostrick – a famous domainer
RH
“Can A big company that can get by without needing the name”
Sure but at what cost?
How much lost traffic and how many lost sales and customers?
Yahoo branded flickr.com and grew it into a top 50 Alexa site, but how much traffic did they lose in all those years to flicker.com because they didn’t spend a few bucks to secure that domain?
Fair to say millions of visitors went to flicker.com instead.
So when your talking about a company like Amazon which has a market cap of $78 Billion why not spend $18K to secure a domain of a huge new product they will spend millions to promote.?
I agree with that Mike, I was asking about do you agree it pigeon holes the current owner ? Because what can they do with the name if Amazon does not buy the name ?
$18.5k – commission seems like a very good price for a domain name that was hand registered back in 2006. Congrats to Gregg on a nice sale.
I have one domain that I recently decided to develop. Kind of a labor of love kind of thing. Since I have started working on it have had 3 seperate offers.
The last was almost large enough for me to give up this labor of love. They offer me enough to buy a little something I have my eye on and the labor of love will be over.
Will be interesting to see if this name was purchased by another domaineer.
I have to agree with “Supp O Sition”. Chances are that if Amazon were really interested in the domain, they probably would have snagged it themselves *before* they announced the name of their new brand.
Elliot
Frank owns MusicLocker.com why don’t you write to him and offer him $18,500 and see what he says
are you sure the domain sold and it wasn’t that Gregg just removed the domain?
“Chances are that if Amazon were really interested in the domain, they probably would have snagged it themselves *before* they announced the name of their new brand.”
Agreed, thats more than likely, as far as I read in the article the word “locker” is only used to describe some form of media storage.
That’s not the same thing as announcing that the brand name will be called media locker
They already own AmazonMedia.com.
….could be just wishfull thinking or jumping the gun for the new buyer but as always time will tell. 🙂
ps) Google alerts set with your “domains keywords” can help you keep up with the lastest related news, I’v had a few offers before on the exact same day as a new article was written.
Do you have to pay taxes on a domain name sell? If so how much in taxes would you have to pay on a $1 million dollar domain name that you sold?
Isaac
Yes you have to pay taxes if you sell a domain for more than you paid for it.
Get a hold of an accountant
Recently had a similar experience. Got an offer for Gastro-Bedarf.com (“Gastronomy supplies” in German). Gastro-Bedarf.de just had sold for EUR 8,500 ($12,000).
I don’t think the lesson is to avoid setting a fixed price. The lesson is to not set a fixed price to a number that you’ll be kicking yourself if it sells. There are lots of reasons to set a fixed price and some good reasons not to.
In a marketplace like Sedo, buyers are often willing to increase their budget to buy outright to avoid sending the domain to auction. There are some domains that I refuse to set a fixed price for, but how many offers have I “lost” because the buyer was scared off by not having a fair buy it now price?
And to try to compare any domain sales figures against Frank’s domain sales figures (or your’s Mike) isn’t reasonable either. Random example – I own SpaGetaway[.com] and Marchex owns SpaGetaways[.com]. I’m positive that I’d be willing to take a lot less than they will. Not because their name is far and away better than mine, but because my return on capital doesn’t require me to only cash out when I get a $20k+ offer.
Anyway, grats to the seller for a nice sale.
Afternic wants us to price the domains we list with them. They do this because they have 3+ million of their own domains, through all of their other side/shell companies, listed and competing against the few we might be listing.
I have listed domains with them and after weeks of “pending review” I pulled them. It seems as if Afternic is unmanned. Its a shame because Afternic used to be a great place to sell domains and now it plainly and honestly sucks.
Here’s to hoping BuyDomains puts Afternic out of its misery and either sells it off or destroys it (more than it already has) by pulling the plug on it. It really sucks to use that service these days.
godaddy has the .CO available as a premium domain for $388 – you think that one will last?
@RH: If someone starts a company and or a company begins to sell a product with the same domain name that I own, I have every right to use my domain name because I have had it first. Sorry to them for not being forward thinkers. There is no URDP from that direction. I hold the domain name a lot longer than they suddenly decided to create a product of the same name. Too bad. My attorney would love that case. 🙂
@chris: The .INFO of that name is available for 89 cents on special at Go Daddy too…
@mike: most domainers are not forward thinkers with regard to specific domains, they just scoop up every half decent domain under the sun.
If I name a product medialocker, and the .com will probably never be worth more than $1k to anyone else, I don’t think I should have to pay $18.5k for it.
If even mediocre domains with market value under $1k are priced at $18.5k then how is anyone without pots of cash supposed to start an online business.
If amazon forgets to enquire before their announcement then they may pay a premium – just as hotel builder may pay more for surrounding land if he later wants to add a golf course.
But what domainers do is charge ten times market value for land before developer has even got started. So maybe hotel & golf course never get built.
What is the difference to Amazon for a sum of $18k or $100k, have you checked out their market cap lately, if this avenue is going to bring in 9 figure revenues who really cares, YES, FIXED prices suck, the auction houses have been pushing them because it boosts their bottom lines.
I think it’s a decent price for a domain that could have been in limbo for another 10 years. It’s all relative. Also proves a point, that domaining to some degree is a crapshoot.
@mike Yeah I am sure your firm will love to take on Amazon, that could just tie the case up for years and cost you a lot of money. Got to love domainers its like Harry Potter fantasy all over again. $18,500 is a great price and if some other sucker bought it thinking Amazon would come to them at $100,000 that’s priceless. You can’t write this stuff, classic comedy.
I have had more success long term listing the asking you want. When I used MAKE OFFER on most systems, (Sedo, Afternic, Etc…) it is like tumbleweeds rolling around the plains, offers rarely come in. At least when listing the price, it gives a buyer somewhere to start when deciding if it is even within their range.
I do see the downfall now to doing this because of the point of the story, but there are many strategies we use domaining. Some will generate more return the others.
At least when listing the price, it gives a buyer somewhere to start when deciding if it is even within their range.
Does Amazon “need” a name to function?
or launch a new product?
No
But what are they losing in terms of traffic and audience by not acquiring the domain?
Check out the post I wrote about the UDRP on GoogleMap.com
Did Google go out of business because they didn’t own GoogleMap.com?
no
But they lost 4-5 Million visitors in the 4+ years they didn’t own the domain
So the question is to a company like Amazon isn’t a huge missed opportunity to lose a on of traffic and branding because they won’t spend what is like $.05 to them to acquire the domain?
that is my opinion