Domains, Domain Names For Sale & Domain Name Registration

Top 10 domain name sales WE 15th March 2009

Happy St.Patricks Day and welcome to the 4th weekly top 10 domain name sales post from 3ac for the week ending 15th March 2009. I have trawled the industry to find yet another 10 domain name sale worthy of mention and of course will include my own undeniably interesting and informative commentary on why these sales have been worthy of note. I hope you like St. Patricks day themed sales chart…It took me ages on Powerpoint and Paint…gosh I need a graphic designer!…Anyway, enough small talk lets get on with the show!

A mixed bag this week ranging from a mega sale of $400,000 right down to my own little purchase at $310. So whats going on in the domain aftermarket and what trends are we seeing?

Body.com starts us off at number one, clocking a fantastic $400,000 through online auction site Sedo.com. At the moment it is still parked with sedo under one of their generic landing pages, previously on redirect to Whitehouse.com I believe. Although please do corect me if I am wrong. I have not been able to find out how much the domain was originally purchased for and it is hard to say exactly what it will be developed into. I would like to think that the new owners have thought about it a bit more, whether they are attempting develop it into a full blown site or not, recouping $400k will not be an overnight process and the term “body” being so super generic means that the competition for organic ranking ranges from the BBC to The Body Shop…It will be interesting to see if they are going to attempt to monetise the domain or just sit on it and hope for a profit on resale in a few years…personally I think $400,000 was over priced.

I’m skipping over number two as I just simply don’t like the domain bachelorsdegree.com although I’m sure the term is searched for loads of times and $62,500 is a tidy price to pay… it is just one of those non-descript domain name sales. Now you’re probably thinkning, hang on why did Gary include it if his top ten domain name sales are only supposed to be the one worthy of note. Well, I’ll tell you why…when I have been researching the domain name sales from the last week it strcuk me that there weren’t many that I would consider really interesting to talk about, so begrudgling I had to include one that was for more than $%0k to make it look as interesting as possible! Is the domain name industry flagging a little, are people running out of imagination and too focused on generic domains? You bet I mean come on, none of these domain exactly scream out innovative and refreshing business models. People aren’t re-investing the wheel…It seems as though the domain name industry is going through a period of consolidation in response to the global credit crisis, still maintain some solid sales but nothing really eye catching that will change the industry 180 degrees in 2009.

The next is a personal favourite of mine, a good old dating domain. Findadate.com has screamed in at third place on this weeks top 10 domain name sales chart with a eye watering $31,000 showing that there is plenty of life in the dating industry and that a solid domcot in this fireld will set you back mega bucks. We’ve already seen decent sales this year in the dating domains niche with DateFinder.com selling for $19,000 a few weeks back. I own a few dating domains myself including adult-dating-site.co.uk, a nice keyword rich domain for PPC ads and DateCape.com (as nice brandable one which was aimed at dating in South Africa)

I am going to mention numbers 4 and 8 now. A three character domain selling for more than a two character domain, very interesting indeed. Now my personal opinion is that the person who paid $16,200 for LOI.com has paid well over the odds, considering that the minimum wholesale price paid for an LLL.com in 2009 has been $3,900, but again there have been more that have sold for more. I would hazard that the domain may have been bought as an acronym for the company who has purchased it and you could go as far as to ask if paying $16k is worth it? Then again, resale price in a few years for an investor could easily be $25k+ which would be a great return…still overpriced I think though.

Moving onto 9B.com what a snip at $9,700, there are only 1296 different combinations of 2 character dot coms so this a great long term invstment for the purchaser. Well done!

Now moving on…Pets, pets, pets! They seem to be creating a very healthy online industry at the moment with pet related domain names accounting for some serious sales this year already. Dropping themselves into my top 10 domain name sales chart this week at 6 and 9 are PawNation.com and PetLiving.com. I have had a look into become an affiliate for pet products before as I found that the conversion rates as an average were considerable higher than than many other industries and even got into a bidding war on sedo for dogbeds.co.uk a few weeks back, but chickened out at the last minute losing the auction by a measly fifty bucks… GAZ=LOSER …I was not impressed with myself. But seriously pet related domains are something that I think will continue to give birth to high value sales figures moving forward over the next few years. A great industry to be in, and being a dog owner both domains get a thumbs up from me!

Last but not least, it would be me without mentioning my own purchase in the top ten. Of course its worth of mention because it is completely relevant to my blog! My $310 purchase of DNSeo.com (domain name search engine optimisation) is perfect for where I want to takemy blog. As mentioned in my post at the weekend about domain name seo. Now I know that dnseo.net is already developed as a blog dedicated to search engine optimisation, but I want top continue my efforts with focus on the domain name industry and having a domain name like this under my belt means that if my intentions and aspirations for my domain name seo category come right, I will start it up as a separate site in it own right. as it can cover such a huge variety of topics. I would appreciate any suggestions you have too with regards to developing this domain. Always interested in other peoples opinions. Obviously I am following the trend of the domain name industry in the footsteps of dnjournal, dnforum and dnvideos to name a few, so why the hell not have dnseo?! If you are interested ina joint venture at all with this I would also like to hear from you so please feel free to get in touch via my contact Gary form.

Well that pretty much sums it up for this week. I do hope you found this post useful. Remember I love to hear from people who may have suggestions to make my weekly top ten domain sales even better so please do get in touch!

Oh and before I forget, HAPPY ST.PATRICKS DAY!

All the best

Gary

Tags: dating domains, Domain Name Sales, Domain Name SEO, st patricks days, top 10 domain name sales