Joseph Peterson analyzes ten notable sales that took place at NameJet last month.
What sells and for how much may be objective fact, but that won’t stop us domain investors from voicing our own subjective opinions about quality, strategy, and value. Let’s see what we’ve got …
NameJet reported 82 domain sales that closed at or above $2,000 during the month of July. As with June, I’ve chosen 10 of those domains to look at here; and what better place to start than with the biggest of those big deals, BigDeals.com?
BigDeals.com $36,100 – Obviously, a good name. But was it a good deal? I tend to think that $36k is more or less the maximum retail number for this domain. So hopefully the buyer has the right project ready to launch. If the goal is resale, then the buyer could have done much better elsewhere. My concern isn’t just the interchangeability of positive adjectives (BigDeals, GoodDeals, BestDeals, GreatDeals, TopDeals, RealDeals, WowDeals, AmazingDeals, etc.). There’s also the familiar problem of a singular / plural split. With BigDeal.com parked at GoDaddy, this brand name could turn into an investment of $72k or more — potentially much more. “Deals” are what people are looking for. True. But phrases like “no big deal” or “what’s the big deal?” are material for TV and radio ads, and they add color to BigDeal.com. BigDeals.com may offer big savings. But the singular is a big deal.
PNN.com $23,200 – This … is PNN. Where is Darth Vader when you need him? Truthfully, though, I’m only mentioning this 3-letter .COM sale because it would be weird to skip over 9 LLL.com sales at NameJet between $7.5k and $23.2k. Having tipped my hat to them, I can now confess that I find LLLs to be boring. Even the newest domainer knows their wholesale price range and liquidity. Indeed, they’re liquid because they’re boring. Acronyms are easier to compare than descriptive or brandable domains, which tend to be subtle and unique. So LLLs are traded actively by anyone with money who can count to 3. They can be good investments. Just boring.
K56.com $3,000 – In contrast, this CCC.com is worth discussing because $3k sales for domains of this type are unusual. At first I thought I saw a connection to Oxycodone, which is a commonly abused painkiller. But with a Chinese owner, that’s unlikely. In this case, I confess ignorance. “56” may have some meaning in China, but for me China remains opaque.
YelllowPages.com $2,322 – Here’s another boring sale. Just an extra “L” right smack dab in the middle of a familiar, high-traffic brand. UDRPs can be abused by reverse domain hijackers, but this looks like it might have been an appropriate case. Companies should not have to pay $2k apiece for dozens of typos. Typically, they pay with cease and desist letters, not cash.
PartyIdeas.com $20,100 – This price looks ten times too high. Is it? People spend money on parties, large or small. Think weddings, anniversaries, birthdays, bachelor parties, corporate events, reunions, quinceañeras, etc. Plus, there are 27,100 exact searches for [party ideas] in Google each month. That’s nothing to sniff at! Party planners and caterers can charge quite a bit, even if they are normally locally constrained and unable to take advantage of 99% of those search results. We’ll see what develops. Regardless, it’s pretty clear that NameJet sales like this one frequently reflect retail valuations rather than the wholesale domainer market.
CustomPens.com $10,109 – When I first commented on CustomPens.com, I called the purchase “money well spent”; and I still think so. Over the years, I’ve seen expensive engraved pens awarded at symbolic events. And we’re all familiar with less expensive pens being given out for promotional purposes in bulk. Since pens ship easily, they’re perfect for e-commerce. CustomPens.com is descriptive, definitive, and reads like a branded identity.
ChimneySweep.com $14,544 – This price is somewhat higher than I’d have predicted, but it’s the domain itself that intrigues me. I find myself debating with myself. Does this name give a brand wings? Or cement shoes? Chimney sweeps as a cultural concept have undergone a series of weird transformations. Originally a dirty but mundane profession, William Blake converted it into a symbol of lost innocence. Basically, children were purchased from their parents as apprentices and made to climb inside chimneys to scrub away ash and soot. Charles Dickens arranged for his child hero, Oliver Twist, to narrowly escape such a fate: “Mr Gamfield did happen to labour under the slight imputation of having bruised three or four boys to death already.” And by the time of Mary Poppins, the historical child chimney sweeps became a dancing prancing Dick Van Dyke. So what do you do with a brand like that? Its associations may prove as bad as good, and they are so specific as to be fairly limiting. Then again, anywhere chimneys are in use, they need cleaning. Professional organizations like CSIA.org oversee such things; so ChimneySweep.com may find itself being used not symbolically but literally.
FL.org $14,667 – We’re not looking at just any 2-letter .ORG here. Among other things, it’s the official abbreviation for the state of Florida, which is the 4th largest U.S. state by gross domestic product (GDP). Based on that, the price seems straightforward. Even so, the sale is a notable one.
Ammo.org $2,600 – This domain will make a superb name, and it was bought at a fair price. Forget bullets and shotgun shells, which are better sold through a .COM or a .NET. We’re looking at “ammo” in its metaphorical sense — preparation, evidence, leverage, fire power. Ammo.org is also a viable acronym for multi-word names beginning with “association”, “american”, “automotive” or containing the state of Missouri (“MO”).
ElHeraldo.com $7,553 – I’ve already written about this ubiquitous Spanish newspaper name (“The Herald”). Nevertheless, as someone who views Spanish domains as being an attractive but undervalued investment opportunity, I want to underline the fact that these dominios are selling by telling the public twice. In fact, NameJet also sold Valores.com ($5,202) last month, which I discussed here. For my money, anyone looking for big deals, would have done better with 7 domains equal in value to Valores.com than with BigDeals.com.
Opinions?
Anticareer.com says
FYI: If you go to bigdeals.com and make an offer it will reject it and tell you that only offers of $1,000,000 or higher are permitted. I have a feeling the buyer is going to be sitting on this $36k purchase quite a long time.
couponpages says
Although some LLLs are not necessarily strong domains, I think anything ending with NN is a strong name because of N is a very common letter, and NN already has an established connection in many people because of networks like CNN and TNN.
A good rule of thumb with LLL names is to think in terms of Scrabble letter values. In Scrabble, common letters generally are worth just 1 point, but uncommon letters like Q, J, or Z are worth 10, because fewer words use them. Using that premise, LLLs that have lower scoring letters would be more useful / valuable than those with high scores. As such, it would be much easier to find a buyer for TNN (worth 3 points total in Scrabble), than QJZ (worth 28 points in Scrabble).
As for BigDeals.Com… as a coupon domain guy, I see the value, regardless of the presence of the singular version. I had great success with CouponPages for over 15 years before I decided to buy the singular version from a squatter. The Squatter only had a park page, so I didn’t care. Once I decided to buy it from him, I monitored the traffic… virtually zero.
Also, the fact that it has many other meanings outside of discount shopping is a plus to me. In advertising, that’s known as an anchor, and it’s definitely a great way for people to remember your brand.
Joseph Peterson says
That Scrabble analogy is a good one.
couponpages says
Thanks.
I realized that the hard way, when I tried to create decent site ideas from a bunch of short LLL and LLLL domains I had a few years ago. Simply stated, some domains were nearly impossible to turn into viable acronyms, while others with those common letters yielded a bunch of variations.
Throwing a number into the mix makes it even more difficult. I sold of 17W.Com a few years back, because I simply couldn’t create anything useful with it.
Joseph Peterson says
What really complicates discussions of short CCC or CCCC domains is China, since they use some numeral sequences to stand for words and since (for Chinese) strings of letters are unlikely to be acronyms.
Scrabble for buyers who use the latin alphabet. But a completely different set of standards for China.
couponpages says
Correct again. For 17W, he buyer was from China.