Re: Domain Name purchasing

From: David Jameson <djameson_at_dotster.com>
Date: Wed 07 Jan 2004 09:54:22 -0600

Ryan,

There is a multi-million dollar industry that revolves around the expiring
of domain names, their resale and the traffic that comes with them.
SnapNames.com, NameWinner.com & Pool.com are but a few of the "Grabbers" out
there. People such as yourself, get names the moment (And I mean within a
millisecond!) that they are available again after having been abandoned by
their previous owner. People get these names for various reasons. Some
speculate on them such as the gentleman from Florida that picked up
"men.com" for $15,000 in 1997 and resold it for $1,300,000 a few weeks ago.
At the market's height, a handful of domain names sold for millions of
dollars, including $7.5 million for business.com in late 1999 and $3 million
for loans.com in January 2000.

A larger part of the resale market is just as you indicated... capitalize on
the residual traffic that a Domain name had at one time. It is not
something that a name is generally resold for, it is however the reason why
a name is purchased from one of the grabbers at auction. These "traffic
aggregators" generally own hundreds or thousands of names and get millions
of hits per month from their many domain names. They convert those hits
into money via pay per click search engines and other CPM advertisers. It
is a game that is very tricky, but can be very fun and profitable! As your
previous example stated... "and 1000 hits per month came across it" ... may
be worth $4 in revenue each month. That does not sound like much, but if I
got the name for $20, the first 5 months pay for the name and the rest of
the traffic is profit. As you can see, it does not make a lot of sense when
you only have a few names. But if you have hundreds or say 30,000... its a
different story.

About 20,000 names expire every day!

On your SnapName question; I believe you are given the ability to "move"
your Snapback three times in a year. After a year the "Snapback" expires
and you are out your money if you did not get the name you were hoping to
get. The other two mentioned, Namewinner and Pool, are an auction model
such that you only pay if they successfully get the name for you. The
minimum bid will usually get you the name you're looking for unless others
want it too. (Minimum Bid: $20 Namewinner, $60 Pool) The bidding can go
well into the thousands if it is a very popular name like men.com...

Looking is always free,

David Jameson
Director of Sales
www.NameWinner.com
www.Dotster.com
www.MyDomain.com
www.NamesDirect.com
DJameson_at_Dotster.com




Received on Wed Jan 07 2004 - 09:54:22 CST