Back in October the domain name FishTrack.com sold on Afternic.com for $2,995.
Today according to a Press Release, “Surfline/Wavetrak, Inc., the world leader in surf and marine forecasting and international editorial content has just released a new website, Fishtrack.com, that offers the latest sea surface imaging with global wind and swell forecasting capabilities in an easy to use layered interface.”
“High resolution Sea Surface Temperature (SST) and Chlorophyll images are key to offshore fishermen in the search for the best areas to target pelagic species, such as tuna and billfish. By combining advanced imaging tools with Buoyweather’s trusted seven-day wind and swell forecasts, fishermen will now be able to both successfully find and target areas with high concentrations of fish, as well as receive accurate seven-day wind and swell forecasts for those areas.”
“The new fishing tool will be available on the Fishtrack.com website along with international editorial content and marine industry reviews.”
So if you check out Surfline.com you will see a PR of 7 an Alexa Rank of just over 5,000 and according to Compete.com over 230,000 visitors a month.
Don’t you think this company would have spent $25K just a quick as $3K for this domain to launch its new site?
I do
This is a buyer the could have spent a lot more for the domain, but it didn’t have to. The domain was most likely pre-priced at that amount and bought it with buy it now.
Buy It Now is a great way of moving a lot of inventory but it doesn’t allow you to see who is offering to buy the domain before they buy it and sometimes the seller leaves a lot of money on the table.
IMHO It did here with this domain name.
Lesson to be learned, this is a $5-8k domain…
Thanks for the real world lesson. Priceless.
A Couple thoughts:
1. You read an awful lot of stuff each day – the eyes and ears of the domain community
2. If your target price is $25K, what is your first counter assuming you’ve made the buyer offer first?
Less to be learned is to raise all our prices very significantly.
Critical mass is coming on to domains ; I’ve never seen so many inquiries as I am seeing lately. So….prices must rise!
Here’s a comparison between domains and franchises:
Try to buy a franchise anywhere for 10k and see what it gets you. Try even 30K or 50K. What you’ll get for 5ok is a thick binder with all kinds of brochures, photos, tech specs, and franchise regulations that you must comply with.
Also along with your 50k will be lots of minimum ad spend requirements to pump up your biz, products at inflated costs that you usually buy from the franchisor, and monthly royalty fees you must also pay the franchisor, plus other misc. fees and rules.
All this for 50k!!!
See the disparity between buying a 50K franchise (which is at the cheap end of the franchise range) and controlling your destiny with one great domain for 5K ?
Let’s not even begin to talk about the advantages of domains over franchises. Domains are so much more versatile also — development, sales, parking, squeeze pages, redirects, etc…. anything you wish it to be.
This is why prices of domains must rise. Domains are a much better deal than most franchisees and almost all other business opportunities.
MHB, What is the best way to sell a domain name? Are you saying that we should not have BIN prices set and leave our domains to make offer? I know sedo promotes for its users to set BIN’s for faster sales but that looks like it just hurts the domain owner. Also what marketplace platform are most end users using to buy domain names the most? I would think that if I was an end user I would already know the domain name that I would want for my business and if it wasent available to register I would contact the domain owner directly through their who is records. I just dont see many end users knowing to goto sedo.com or afternic.com for a domain. I do see however that godaddy may be the best place to list your domain name because of the exposure it gets. Do you know if there is a weekly list of names that are sold on godaddy. It would be interesting to see if their weekly sales is higher than the others.
This domain is nothing special and $3K is a more than reasonable sale.
Just because a company has a large budget does not mean they are prepared to spend that on a domain. At $25K other options would probably have been considered.
The vast majority of domain investors don’t have the ability to extract max value on every domain. It is better to leave some money on the table than all of the money on the table.
For the average domainer walking away from good offers, on the rare chance you get that one huge payoff, is a bad business model.
You are better off selling average domains and reinvesting in much better domains with the capital.
Brad
Agree with Brad. If the price is to high Surfline/Wavetrak, Inc., might have just used a different fish domain and the guy might have sat with FishTrack.com for years. Maybe $3,000 was the limit.
Agree with Brad 100%.
This happens. Every now and then, some company comes along and buys some marginal domain for a small figure, then we see who gets it and say AH HA! SEE! YOU SHOULD’VE ASKED FOR MORE!
You can go completely broke with that method.
Congrats to you, Schilling, Schwartz and a few other mega portfolio holders who run black with parking so you can swing for that home run on every sale, but there may come a day when you look back on a lot of those small and intermediate offers on marginal names and wish you’d taken them.
Then there’s the elephant in the room that is so scarcely talked about in domainer circles- that just because a large company theoretically could’ve spent more, doesn’t mean they were prepared to. Anyone who’s been around this block more than once has busted a potentially lucrative sale on the basis of a fair and accurate estimation of their counter-party, who had the money to pay a lot, but just didn’t want to.
So, yeah, lightning strikes on FishTrack.com.
Pass up four figure offers on names of a similar caliber, you’re going to leave a ton on the table.
i agree with MHB
but it depends on your overall strategy – flipping vs investing and waiting for the perfect buyer
give a man a fish… he eats for a day.
teach a man to fish… he’s gonna be buyin’ a lot of pricey gadgets.
DomainNewsWire noted yesterday that Tucow’s in-house unit’s average domain sold price doubled over last year.
So, prices seem to have been firming in last year.
Brokers like SEDO and Afternic urge domain owners to list at BIN – and ‘more realistically’ aka at lower prices – so that they can more likely make a sale and earn a commission.
Mass market brokers’ self interest is in conflict with their domainer customers. They want to move product; not get the highest price for their customers.
Dont expect brokers to be looking out for your interest as a seller. All they are interested in is soliciting inventory that they can peddle. The lower price they can quote, the more likely a prospective buyer will respond. Plain as that.
Budgets are still limited, and often purchases are made from brokers at 30-40% lower than first quoted prices. Only the brokers, and their sellers know what the actual sales price was compared to the asking price. I am not aware of any databases that show the ‘asking price’ and actual selling price; so one can make an educated assessment, like you can looking at residential real estate MLS data; which has both ‘listing price’ and ‘sales price’.
Brokers interest is in concluding a transaction. The lower the price, the more likely buyers. The more likely that a domain will sell. So, what’s new?
Also, the value of a domain is what a willing buyer and a willing seller are willing to do a transaction at, at the moment the transaction concludes. That’s valuation 101. The value a prospective buyer assigns to a domain depends on its perceived value to the buyer, and that buyer’s ability to finance purchase (ie budget, or emotional self control(g) – why sometimes buyers get carried away at art and collectible auctions)
Time to ‘get real’ and act accordingly.
Nacho…when you by a franchise you are buying a brand with a historically proven proven revenue stream. When you buy a domain you buy a brand and have to build a revenue stream. Money costs money.
@ david “I just dont see many end users knowing to goto sedo.com or afternic.com for a domain”
See the sales reports? They are selling millions of dollars a month! Cant all be domainers. Someone obviously knows to go there
@ DAN “but it depends on your overall strategy – flipping vs investing and waiting for the perfect buyer”
The question becomes how many perfect buyers are there in the world for a name like this.
ANSWER: Not many!
If the name has mass appeal thats one thing, if its a name like this one its another. Not like the guy is gonna have buyers pounding down his door to get the name. Bill Gates can afford $1000 for a big mac too but doubt he would pay that!
@Macho……..when I buy domains eight times out of ten I buy only if there is a current revenue stream behind it. I do no development and buy no developed sites. This is just parking income for the most part and other rev monetization methods.
I’d also argue that when you buy a franchise you buy a name but STILL have to build the business for your territory. I’ve done it before.
Some of the posters here say it is better to take the 3K and run.
I’d agree with that maybe if you are speaking of non-income generating properties or domains that have no or almost no traffic, but if your domains are spin out positive cash flow then the game changes and it makes more sense to sell one domain for 25K instead of eight domains at 3K for 24K. This way you still get to keep your other seven money-generating properties.
@RE……..Quote:
“Congrats to you, Schilling, Schwartz and a few other mega portfolio holders who run black with parking so you can swing for that home run on every sale,……………”
Nobody should be in this game with an entire portfolio or big tranches of individual domains that don’t run in the black. If you are running in the red you either are picking bad domains, have too many “brandables” that won’t get the clicks necessary to cover reg costs, or are still using some lame parking company, or a combo of these.
That’s a unnecessary business model when profitable domains are everywhere.
@Macho……I want to address your comment again. If you are not starting a new franchise territory for the 5oK I was speaking of, but actually buying an established franchise location, you can easily be talking $200,000 to 1M + .
That’s like buying a domain with an established money-earning site on it.
Fishtrak spelt the way the company spells wavetrak is parked.
Fishtraker is free to be regd.
I doubt that they would have made an $30k sale here but ultimately we will never know the answer to this.
I agree with both sides of the arguments being made on the thread.
That’s a unnecessary business model when profitable domains are everywhere.
—–
Enough of them to sustain a living? Acquirable for prices that offer enough up-front return that one doesn’t have to lay out $1,000,000 at a TRAFFIC auction to get back $30K in declining parking revenue?
This isn’t 1998. This is 2012.
The mega portfolio holders have a very different model that is unique to them, because they were acquiring $10,000, $25,000, $50,000, $100,000 assets for $8. Those assets might also have earned an annual2000% profit relative to their carrying costs, too. Rinsing-and-repeating that model over and over again- to the tune of tens or hundreds of thousands of domains- is what made those guys. They have certain luxuries that others don’t in terms of pricing.
It’s still possible to own a profitable speculative domain portfolio that doesn’t earn parked, but it’s a lot trickier and definitely not for the faint of heart or weak of mind. In this model, turning down four figure sales on names like FishTrack.com is suicide. Hell, owning names like FishTrack.com to begin with is suicidal in that model.
I think BIN is a poor strategy. It may move domains somewhat quicker but negotiating is a much better way to have higher overall returns. Sedo pushes BIN because it is more likely the transaction will happen through them and not outside. It serves them but not the domain seller as much.
It all depends right? If the company had already chosen this brand name and was dead set on it then $25k shouldn’t have been a problem. But if they hadn’t chose a brand name yet and were shopping for a domain “that would work for their needs”, to start a brand on, then don’t you think they start to have a lot more options at $25k? If this were the case then I’d say your domain was the one they liked the most at the price point.
Sedo has domains listed for sale with bid prices in the $$thousands$$ that are not even registered to anyone? Is that even legal? And is anyone actually paying 3000€ for a domain you can register for 20 bucks?
David
Personally I don’t offer domains with fixed prices.
Again everyone has to operate in a manner they feel comfortable.
I personally think you leave a lot of money on the table when you sell your domains at BIN UNLESS you do tremendous volume.
So if you are like Mike Mann and sell $10K worth of domains a day at $600 at BIN well that’s awesome, but you have to have inventory into the hundreds of thousands of domains to do that.
If your selling domain occasionally at BIN, I think you are never going to have a big sale your never going to be in a position to see who your buyer might be or finding that perfect end user for that domain to maximize its value.
RE
“”Congrats to you, Schilling, Schwartz and a few other mega portfolio holders who run black with parking so you can swing for that home run on every sale, but there may come a day when you look back on a lot of those small and intermediate offers on marginal names and wish you’d taken them””
Your right and your wrong
Of the three domainers you mention, Frank myself and Rick we are completely different situated and handle our sales quite differently
Rick as you know is a six figure offer guy.
Don’t offer Rick $10K- $20K or $30K for a domain he won’t consider it
Rick owns something less than 20K domains.
Frank of course until the recent couple of years never sold a domain, like FMA all offers were rejected.
Now Frank actively sells domains and not all are in the six figures.
Frank owns over 300K domains
On the other hand I have sold domains this year for as low as $3K.
I try to price domains at what I believe is FMV for an end user.
I don’t just place a silly price on a domain and “Hail Mary” the offer.
I own 75K domains.
So generalizing, especially with group as small as three domainers is going to produce a lot of inaccurate assumptions.
On the other hand since I don’t place BIN on domains and do turn down a lot of offers, I have no idea of how many sales I’m missing or what the result would have been, if I did it differently.
At the end of the day everyone has to have their own strategy for selling domains and that will vary person to person.
Thanx for sharing! 😀
Open I PERMALINK
@ david “I just dont see many end users knowing to goto sedo.com or afternic.com for a domain”
See the sales reports? They are selling millions of dollars a month! Cant all be domainers. Someone obviously knows to go there
They’re getting to those pages from parked pages most likely, so Sedo isn’t really doing any work to get the buyers in the door. They want that volume up so they tell you to list at BIN prices. A mom and pop end user buyer doesn’t naturally know to go to SEDO, although I think they are making in-roads in certain verticals. They type in the domain and land on a page with a price and have the option to buy it. OR they go to godaddy.com because that’s who they know and they see the list of names there. Sedo relies heavily on the domain as the marketing vehicle. BIN prices help to facilitate more of those deals.