The Co-founder of YouTube Chad Hurley just announced announced on Twitter that he was launching his new Video site, MixBit.com which he purchased on Afternic.com less than a month ago for just $2,088.
“The future of video is launching soon!”
Says Mixbit.com
Interestingly the same week MixBit.com sold for $2,088 on Afternic.com another version of the domain, mixedbits.com also sold for $2,488.
MixedBits.com not being forward to MixBit.com but has a Network Solutions placeholder which is the same registrar where mixbit.com is registered.
HugeDomains.com was the seller of MixBit.com
BuyDomains.com was the seller of MixedBits.com
Now My Hurley should try to pick up Mixbits.com which is a parked page.
You can see a video of Mr. Hurley’s presentation on what mixbit.com from SXSW, here.
Bottom line; another brand just secured its internet presence for $2K, talk about leaving money on the table.
Did they really leave money on the table? Do you think he would have spent more? Since this name was owned by Huge Domains it would have been bought through Huge Domains website if him and his team came up with this name and did a simple search but this didn’t happen. All of Huge Domains names redirect to their own website. It was bought through Afternic because they didn’t come up with this name first they went to Afternic searching for a name that they liked, found this one and bought it. If they didn’t find this one they would have found another one in the same price point. There are thousands upon thousands of great names just waiting to be bought in this price range. Finding great domains is getting easier because of easy to search through lists on sites like Huge domains etc…….It is way to time consuming trying to come up with a great name and negotiating with some crazy guy that wants 100k for a so so name. It is easier just to look through lists and find one that works for your business concept. Naming is a true art form and coming up with a great name is very hard and extremely time consuming and most won’t waste the time or even have the creative ability to do it. Business concepts are very fast moving in the venture capital landscape and going to a list, picking a great name at a great price and moving on with the concept is the new way of doing things.
Todd
We will never know
There are a lot of price points between $2,500 and $100K
mixbit isn’t worth more than what was paid, not a chance. I, and most domain investors, wouldn’t even have hand reg’d that P.O.S. domain. The seller was very forunate to get what he/she got…they should consider themselves lucky
All these bloggers who keep talking about fixed pricing, are steering investors in the wrong direction… Anyone can tell you, one grand slam can set you up right, if you think you can keep buying great names putting fixed prices on them, you are going to end up losing, you never know when a name, and a well funded buyer like this come along, and can change the game for you.
They left money on the table, both are warehousers, and they need to keep flipping to keep the lights on, and bills paid, just like selling insurance policies, hope the renewals don’t outpace the premiums…
We all know money was left on the table, Andrew Reyberry is a vaccum and sucks it all up, he has ruined the pricing game for a lot of domainers, he is not a friend of the industry by any means.
@WorldStarJobs
Mixbit as a domain name may have varied value to any number of buyers, but as something that looks like it will become a well-financed brand and website, that price was a steal.
Although the hope (hype?) of it being “the future of video” has a lot of long-established competition betting against it… but we’ll see. In any event, it’s always good to dream big. 😉
The odds now or ever of anyone else being willing to pay more than $2088 seem slim, therefore the price was plenty fair, even if money was left on the table.
And this, my friends, is the outcome of listing domains with fixed prices. The offer came from ‘behind’ and the seller had no chance to research the market or the background of whoever was making the offer. I hope they are happy with the $2k sans fees. Always list your domains with a “make an offer” option, or you’ll end up leaving thousands of dollars on the proverbial table.
I would have agreed that money was left on the table, but for the fact that the Mixbit.com does not pass the radio test. Many who hear the name on radio will rush to Mixbeat.com. The leak could be as much as 100%. They need to secure that domain as well. For that reason alone, I will say the price is fair five or take a few bucks.
However, it is wrong to list prices with these markets. They come up with silly research about which type of listing sells better, as if…
What ARCO said and though sometimes after researching the buyer I will double the reserve on a DNS inquiry and play poker and lose, I know if they are serious they will be back. And if 2-3 of them show up in a year, there is more demand then supply. Those who settle for the next best name on the list are writing their death sentence because the only way to compete today is to START with the name. That IS your advertising and marketing team hired and effective day ONE!
Hahaha.
Show of hands, how many here own domain names?
Everyone. OK, check.
Show of hands, how many here have been in the position of being the very ‘end user’ you yourselves are targeting?
Now now now, you liars, fantasists, pretend ‘heavy hitters’ and Crouching Tigers can put your hands down. We’re only interested in hearing from those who can point to an actual, externally capitalized venture where you, yourself, were involved with establishing an upstart identity and buying the domain. Now, show of hands?
Ahhh, isn’t that interesting. No hands raised this time.
Allow me to offer a little glimpse into the anatomy of a domain name decision. (expect to see these concepts parroted later on in other blogs as if they were native wisdom of the writer)
You and your partners sit down with a sheet of paper and write down 20 names, phrases, words, whatever you want your business to be called. If you’re COMPLETELY broke or funded but otherwise retarded, you plan this phase entirely around whatever you can hand register at Godaddy for nine bucks.
But lets disregard them and assume we’re talking about the group who knows better.
Same idea, same sheet of paper, brainstorm up the same 20 or so names.
If the people doing the brainstorming have a general idea about the domain world and what they’re up against, they’ll intuitively know the types of names to not even bother considering. Those who don’t understand this will have to make a few different 20 name lists before they even arrive at viable choices that fall within their allocation range. Then, they go post a lament on Twitter about how the good names are taken by ‘squatters’.
But now we’ve arrived at a 20 name list that’s viable, prioritized into quartiles:
* The five names we want most
* The five names we’d be happy to get
* Five decent names
* The minimally acceptable five names we could think of.
Now, hit the whois and see who owns what.
Frank Schilling owns some, some are in use, some are listed on various domain marketplaces, some are just sitting there unusued.
Disregard Schilling (although he seems to have reoriented his pricing structure recently, so maybe not so much anymore) and any names on the list that are developed, owned by major corps or obviously unattainable.
What’s left are the marketplace, 404’d or parked names.
If one of your top 5 names is a BuyDomains for $2453, you buy it. No worries, it’s a worthy expense. If that same domain name is owned by a domainer who offers to sell it for $50,000, you politely chuckle and move along down the list.
See, what none of you seem to understand is that outside of category killing generics, it’s a RARE day when a brand type domain is so compelling as to be irreplaceable or otherwise non-substitute. Unlike definitive generic domains, brandable names have plenty- arguably, infinite- competition. It’s worth spending a couple grand on a decent one, sure, but this stupid domainer delusion that because a decent upstart spent 2K on a BIN price domain, well clearly they would’ve spent $10K 0r $50K, that’s soooooo funny and suggests the people doing the blabbering literally have no idea what the domain buyer ecosystem or the startup buying process really looks like.
You’re welcome.
Gordo
Your talking about one kind of domain end user buyer, no doubt your scenario is played out every day however not every domain end user buyer is the same.
For some buyers the name is vital, not interchangeable
Sometimes the end user falls in love with a domain.
Sometimes the business is built around the name.
Sometimes there is only one perfect domain for the venture.
This “stupid domainer delusion” that people would have paid $10K or $50K for a domain, if it wasn’t BIN priced at $2,500 is based on 14 years of experience of dealing with end users.
If we all followed your theory this stupid domainer would have wound up selling meet.me $2,500 rather than for $450,000 (which was still cheap)
We’re talking about a name like mixbit.com.
While I’m no real fan of .me, meet.me is unarguably in the top-top class of .me names. That is not the type of name you’d have priced for $2500 Buy It Now.
MixBit.com is precisely such a name, or, feel free to have a portfolio stacked with ‘low probability’ names like that and turn down the $2500 offers when they come, you’re burning a helluva lot more money than you’re making.
Be honest; if MixBit.com were available to hand register, would you add it to the portfolio of Most Wanted Domains? The answer is 100% no, you wouldn’t. Not even for $8, you wouldn’t want that name, you know it, I know it. I wouldn’t want the name if it were pushed into my account for free.
The guys who are playing the mega volume lower quality churn and burn game have entirely different considerations. They take the $2500 when it comes.
I understand the play of companies like buydomains,com and hugedomains that have hundreds of thousands of domains and there business model of chunning a lot of lower priced domains, just as I understand the end users who could care less what domain they acquire as long as its cheap.
Just saying its not everyone’s business model and plenty of domainers who do business a different way and have been successful for many years are not stupid or delusional but you do have to know what domains you own and what they are worth and if you own $2k domain names then to hold out for $500K sales is not a good business model.
On the other hand I can’t allow a blanked statement that all domain buyers go through the same exercise to select a domain, nor can we ignore the price that many sites later pay to upgrade their cheap domain to a better, less confusing one take flickr.com as an example
@Gordo,
You are losing the debate to Berkens.
I think all of do understand what you are trying to say, but it is so remote that it probably occurs in less than 2% of the cases.
Serious business people, whether domainers or not, cannot base their businesses on people like the ones you are attempting to discuss. People who have no focus on their name, people who can take or leave a name, who can go with any alternative, people who do not care how many type-ins, or brand-ability, or whatever rubric is required to spark a bang on the market, those people are clueless, and we call them 5th avenue boys.
So Gordo, you are clearly outmatched by Berkens. I’m making the call here now: you lost the debate.
Like I said earlier, Mixbit.com doesn’t pass the radio test, and that’s probably why it got sold for $2088. The buyer should be concerned with leakage to Mixbeat.com, when the site becomes successful.
@ MB, of course there are examples of shitty domain name decisions later costing a company big or some freak example of a hyper-capitalizsed startup that’s domain-centric and willing to blow their entire wad on some shockingly pedestrian name. Outliers aside, I’m certainly willing to wager my scenario plays itself out 1,000 times for every 1 time the latter occurs. We can’t escape the fact that we’re talking about an otherwise worthless, totally backwater name here. Yes, there are times when no pricing is appropriate but on names like this, we all know its better to bat .300 across a season than to hit one 540 footer. As far as the successes of some using ‘eccentric’ models, lets just say they’re lucky they have what they already have, things would be VERY different if they started now, and leave it at that.
@ “Domainclature”, please, STFU.
You’re precisely the kind of know-nothing retard I’m talking about. Look at your own domains, for christs sake. What a shit show. How about instead of pretending you’re a relevant presence in this conversation by declaring winners and losers, you instead ask Berkens to have a look at your names and give his opinion. Wait, scratch that. He’s a pretty diplomatic guy. Go ask Schwartz. He’ll tell you straight.
Hope you’re good making the coodle-ooh sound like all the Pigeons do.
@Gordo
At least you can take a look at my names, actually part of them. Yes go on take a look at http://Kri.co, or http://JointVenturefy.com, I wear it as a badge of honor that a punk like you don’t approve, which means i’m on to something. I walk the narrow path. Sheep is not welcome.
Back to the conversation at hand: if any name will do, as you tend to be arguing, why should a business, or an individual pay more than a registration fee for a name when all they have to do is add a 1, 2, or whatever to any name and get going? You are psychotic, pal. People like you have no names to show, all you do is bad mouth those of us proudly displaying our beauties.
Having not done so already, I went to the MixBit website and am intrigued. That lead to Google to try and find out more… although any concrete details of what Hurley has in mind for the site are hard to come by. All I could find out is that it appears that it will be be some kind of collaborative/social video creation site.
In any event, debating the price issue of the MixBit name or its value as a name that one would want to have in their portfolio seems to be misguided until the true nature of the site is revealed. And given that Hurley was the buyer, surely he could have afforded to pay more to buy a ‘better’ name, if MixBit wasn’t quite up to snuff.
After all, this wasn’t a domain name bought for speculation. It was bought to create a brand for a website. The cost of putting together the site, employing people to do it, getting office space, marketing, etc, is so much more than what he paid for the domain. So in this case, one could guess that it would be unlikely that the purchase decision was based on price, when all the other ingredients needed to create the site could possibly be measured in hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. To spend that much and then become miserly when it comes to one’s corporate identity, would seem overtly counterproductive to most.
Domenclature.com
Actually I’m going to disagree with you here:
“probably occurs in less than 2% of the cases.”
I tend to agree with Gordo that is happens a lot more than that.
I still deal with 15 end users a day via email and there is more than 2% of the population that doesn’t even begin to understand why anyone has to pay more than $10 for a domain when “godaddy is selling them to $10”
@Berkens,
We are not talking about people looking for a personal page. We are talking about businesses. I doubt any self-respecting business person in 2013 is so naive about internet and domain names that they would undertake a venture without a clue. They may not be “experts”, but they are not as stupid as Gordo portrays.
I am willing to bet that less than 2% of business people are that naive about internet and domain names. We’ve had .com bubble, dot com millionaires, for well over a decade, perhaps 2.
“I still deal with 15 end users a day via email and there is more than 2% of the population that doesn’t even begin to understand why anyone has to pay more than $10 for a domain when “godaddy is selling them to $10″
“I am willing to bet that less than 2% of business people are that naive about internet and domain names. We’ve had .com bubble, dot com millionaires, for well over a decade, perhaps 2.”
I deal with end users daily and Michael Berkens is right. The percent is WAY higher than 2%.
I have to educate end users daily on the value of a domain name, their price expectations, and what you can do with a domain name.
I know people who have been on the internet for 15+ years and did not know .ORG could be owned by a non profit, or who have never heard about .BIZ.
The average person knows far less about domain names than most domainers seem to think they know.
Brad
@Brad
“The average person knows far less about domain names than most domainers seem to think they know”. – Brad
Like I said, we are not talking about the average person.
“Like I said, we are not talking about the average person.”
Most businesses are small and are run by “average people”.
These make up the majority of all domains inquires and sales.
If you are only talking about big business, many of them do not get it as well.
At many large companies the marketing executives are older, and started well before the internet existed. Some of my worst offers have come from major companies.
Brad
they will end up in the graveyard of once-great Internet companies. … There’s No Success Like Failure: See Google’s Biggest Product Flops and the web’s biggest flops what do they have in common- their branding is based in compromise and in doing so they are DOA http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/4256.html
@Brad
BTW you have a nice collection of names for sell, including .Net, .Us, and .Org
At domenclature.com, and JointVenturefy.com, we develop a lot of our names, and sell some others, we are primarily a .Com company.
I do agree that most people are not as aware of the potential of solid domain names as they should. If you think about it, not even us domainers are perfect. Most honest domainers admit that they have pideon shit domains too. See http://www.ricksblog.com/my_weblog/2013/03/the-great-pigeon-sht-drop-of-2013.html
An end user does not need to know about .org, .net, .us, or the new gTLDs in other to be considered intelligent on domaining. As a matter of fact, most domain experts would consider it a virtue, rather than vice, that these end-user know nothing except .com
Secondly, the market places, as well as regular domainers, sell millions of dollars worth of domains every single week, if not daily, to entrepreneurs, and businesses on a daily basis.
Third, before the bubble burst, internet domain name business was a regular staple on CNN, CNBC, and other appropriate business outlets, even on local news, magazines etc.
We are still in the infancy of this thing. There’s no doubt that there will be boom and bursts along the way. I happen to give businesses a little bit more credit that most. In my opinion, most businesses, and business people do know about domain names and their after market activities. The trouble is that so many people in main stream advertising try to impede the success of this new medium, and do many things to undermine it.
Domenclature,
Please STFU – you are the absolute epitome of the average domainer…nothing but an almost broke retard.
You come across as a male version of Louise; and no, that’s not a compliment.