Prices range from a couple thousand to millions.

I was just scrolling through Sedo’s auction page and came across a listing for a three letter domain, Pat.com, which has a bid of $62,000 with its reserve met. Sedo sold a number of three character domains over the past couple weeks at a wide variety of prices. A quick search at NameBio shows that recent .com three character domain sales range from a couple thousand dollars up to millions depending on a number of factors. As a starting point, here are three things to consider when valuing a three letter .com:

1. Do the three letters spell a word? Sex.com, for example, probably shouldn’t be counted in an analysis of three letter domain prices. It sold not because it was three characters, but because of the meaning of the word. Sex.com sold for over $10M in cash and stock. Other three letter domains that are also words include:

Tom.com $2.5M
Fly.com $1.5M
VIP.com $1.4M
Men.com $1.3M
Sky.com $1.0M

(All of these sales were private sales and actual transaction amounts are estimated.)

2. What acronyms can the letters represent? The more combinations, and the more representation by large corporations, the more valuable the domain. You can search for acronyms at AcronymFinder.com.

POS.com sold for $252,500 last year. POS.com is a popular acronym for point-of-sale, a retail term. If you search google for “POS” you’ll also find other uses including the stock symbol for Catalina Marketing and an acronym for Public Opinion Strategies.

3. How are other versions of the three characters being used? If the .net and .org versions of a three character domain are in use you can expect the .com version to be valuable. POS.net and POS.org are in use, making POS.com a hot commodity.

Name Intelligence event returns to Seattle in August.

Registration for Name Intelligence’s 2007 Domain Roundtable is now open. This year’s conference will again take place in Seattle but this year will be in Summer (August 13-15). Early registration is $1495. The first 100 people to register at DomainRoundtable.com will receive an eNom reseller account with a $100 credit. Registrants who complete a survey save an additional $50 and there are also discounts for customers with DomainTools memberships (Name Intelligence runs the popular DomainTools site).

Domain Roundtable does a good job attracting people from all facets of the domain industry, from ICANN to domainers to corporations. Although the agenda has not been announced, here’s a teaser from Name Intelligence:

This year, we’re going to crush the tired old formulas of cookie-cutter domain conferences and bring together the domain industry with the most exciting breakthrough topics and attendees ever presented. The potential will be there for you to experience incredible deal-making, domain sales and networking opportunities like never before…

The theme of our event is “Domains Breaking into the Open Market of the Business Community”. The Domain Roundtable Conference 2007 will provide domainers a path for domain sales outside the confines of the domain industry. Industry insiders and the outside business community will converge to provide a platform for expanding the wisdom of domain values to brand managers and developers in other industries. This is the new and needed direction for the domain industry to take and the Domain Roundtable Conference 2007 will be the first in pioneering access to the business community at large as a fully proactive domain market.

GoDaddy to manage over 850,000 domains registered at RegisterFly.

GoDaddy, the world’s largest registrar with over 20M domains under management, is picking up another 850,000 registrations. The company inked an agreement with ICANN and RegisterFly to take over management of the domains previously registered at RegisterFly. Ever since RegisterFly came under fire several months ago and lost its ICANN accreditation, domain owners have found it difficult to transfer domains to other registrars. Among the problems:

-Inability to unlock domains at RegisterFly
-Inability to get authorization codes to transfer domains from RegisterFly
-Registrants of domains with protected Whois records unable to prove ownership

This resolution is the best possible at this point in time for RegisterFly customers. GoDaddy will likely put a 60 day lock on domains before they can be transferred out for “security reasons”. However, this is much better than losing a domain altogether.

RegisterFly was known for its very low prices, but those prices came at a cost. RegisterFly customers who now have a large portfolio of domains at GoDaddy should consider the company’s Discount Domain Club, which offers .com domains for $6.71 per year. The cost for the club is $89.99 per year. However, the discounted pricing is $2.46 less than GoDaddy’s regular pricing. So if you have 37 domains or more it makes sense to sign up for the discount club.

Article features NameMedia, parent company of BuyDomains.

“THINK you have a good handle on the Internet economy? Try this one. What Internet business has raised $120 million in financing in the last year, owns 725,000 Web sites, and has as its chief executive the former head of Primedia and International Data Group?” asks an article in today’s New York Times.

The answer is NameMedia, the domain name holding company that also owns domain resellers BuyDomains and Afternic. Unlike many recent articles in the mainstream press about domain names, this article does a good job distinguishing between cybersquatting and legitimate domain investing:

The business is a far cry from the days of cybersquatting, where speculators bought up names of businesses to which they had no legitimate claim, but it does represent a vindication of sorts for many who bought hundreds or thousands of random Web address names on the hope that one day they would be worth something.

The article quotes analysts that say NameMedia and its competitors could represent the next wave of IPOs.

My question remains…why should companies like this go public? There are a couple reasons. One is to return capital to investors through a liquidity event. The other is if the money will be reinvested in developing thousands of web sites. With investors in for over $100M, these companies need to grab a very rich valuation to justify the big investments. That may not be hard, given that some of these companies have been buying domainers’ portfolios for as little as 5x annual revenue. Public companies can command 20x annual revenue or more.

But if these companies didn’t have investors looking to cash out in liquidity events, would they ever think about going public? Why not just let the cash flow roll in year after year? (It’s worth noting that many of these investors can’t take dividends because of their charters and limited partners.)

Moniker just released an initial list of domains to be auction in June at the TRAFFIC auction in NYC.

Auction.com, HorseRacing.com, and Slots.com are the three domains with the highest reserves, each slotted at over $5M. Other high-profile domains include:

Base.com
Scotland.com
Student.com
Stuff.com
Cardiology.com
Checkup.com
Elections.com
Ethanol.com
Disease.com
Elections.com
ETHANOL.COM
How.com
Planet.com
Secondmortgage.com
Speak.com
06.com
Avocados.com
Ballot.com
Bonuses.com
Bulk.com
Charters.com
Coed.com
Fees.com
FinancialAnalyst.com
401kPlans.com
Necklace.com
Pen.com
Text.com

Over 3,500 domains have been selected for the auction, but about 225 will be in the live auction. The remainder will be available in the silent auction.

HorseRacing.com and Slots.com are holdovers from the Moniker Casino auction. The top sale from that auction was Scores.com, which went for $1.2M. (A potential sale of Poker.com for over $20M may be in the works.) Domains listed in the NYC auction that do not sell will be heldover for the next Moniker auction at Affiliate Summit in July.

Moniker plans to spend over $200,000 promoting the NYC auction, which will take place Thursday, June 21 at the Grand Hyatt in New York.

Domain Name Wire will provide live coverage from the event.