I was doing some research on the top domain name sales of 2008 and found something very interesting. Forty percent of the top domains sold are not developed.
The following information was compiled using sales reported on DNJournal.
| Domain Name
Invest.com |
Sales Price
$1,015,000 |
Sale Date
9/30/08 |
Status
Parked |
|
Game*
Directly reported from DNJournal.com
“T.J. Demas is applying symmetry to a series of numerical domain purchases for a project he is not yet ready to fully reveal “.
From what I have read it is believed to be some type of a game with the domain names leading to clues.
After sifting through all of the information I am left with one question. Why spend six figures plus on a domain name and not develop?
I would really like to hear what you guys think?
What an interesting article about the top not developed domains sales! I wonder what kinda money that those “parked” ones are making? Also where they are parked? lol Too lazy to check each one!
Thanks again
Patrick, I did a similar analysis for Top domains of 2007 and 2006 last year around this time. Even though a greater percentage of those domains were developed I was still left with the same question.
The only thing I can think of is some of them are earning nice returns from PPC, but they can’t all be.
Nice post Patrick. My first thought was that they
were bought by fellow domainers for holding and resale.
But some of those look like end user prices. Pretty
strange seeing all those parking pages. Even if they
weren’t ready to fully develop you would think someone
who can afford a $100K+ domain name, might hire a designer/
SEO person to build a mini site or set up a coming soon page
to establish a basic search engine presence and collect
email addresses of interested users.
And those number domains. Pretty intriguing… If the rumor is true, it better be one hell of a game to justify $1,183,897
in domain expense!
p.s. Yes, I added the numbers up. I guess part of me was expecting them to add up to that number from LOST that drove Hurley crazy
As others said, the “hold to resale” notion is quite common in the domain community. Those that develop domains usually own less than 20!
Concerning Mr. Demas, his project is much deeper than what was mentioned but I am not at liberty to say anything beyond that
You have some insider info with TJ’s plan?
Give us the gossip
When i first started in the industry i had done the same type of analysis. What i came to find out is that these are most likely projects/products underdevelopment. Think about it, twitter was an idea on a notepad back in 2001 and did not hit the scene till 4 years later. Things take time, i am almost certain with in a couple of years those domains will have found new homes or developed in one way or another.
Also, the same analogy can be put on movies and products that are not out yet. This is why a lot of people watch domain registrations by big companies like Nintendo, Sony, Warner Bros, you get the idea. They WILL reg domains related to up and coming things.
These were my thoughts too – that if you’ve spent this much on a domain and want to develop it, you want to make sure you get your business plan thought out properly and that might take time. And in some of these cases I wonder if the domain purchase comes first then the business plan follows, instead of plan then purchase, especially if the domain is released onto the market through an auction, for example? That would then increase the lead time between purchase and development (with the hope that it earns somes decent PPC in the meantime!)
Nice piece of research BTW, Chef. My favourite has to be Eggs.com – a $100,000+ domain with a free Wordpress ‘blog’ attached to it!
This is prolly to avoid any type of reverse hijacking attempt. I have many clients with high end names with the same mentality. They want these types of sites put on them to avoid any type of confrontation until they can sell the name or develop some sort of business out of the name.
So I looked into the numbered domains a bit…444, 248, 245, 246, 242, 252.
What I found was: gosphel references, a Treatise on the Constitutional Limitations…, peptide chains, vintage baseball cards, Russian literature, numerous random catalogues/indexing/subjects (for whatever), geometric face sets, league bowling scores, Chronological Tolkien, (love this one) “New rare penguin contest!”, Frequency of Grundy-Values (Um Ok), tempurature, winner lists, speech acustics and a ton of other random, nonsensical stuff. So this all means that I still have no idea what game E8.com spent $1,183,897 to develop with them, but…
They seem to like “8″…seriously http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS11093+15-Aug-2008+BW20080815
They have the “E8″ Root system on thier website, but the domains do not fall into that very well from what I see there, however, they just might (I am not a mathematician)…read on.
This may be the answer: http://www.mahalo.com lookup “E8″ or just find your way there through the E8.com website by clicking on “252″.
“The E8 is a complex, symmetrical mathematical pattern. It is part of a class of geometrical patterns known as Lie Groups.1 Physicist Garrett Lisi has used E8 as a model for his unified “Theory of Everything” which describes the nature and structure of the universe.2…”
Time will tell what all this means beyond one heck of a cash outlay and an interesting search query to undertake. So far as the game…well…based on the above, will I become He-Man and the Masters of the Universe if I play? By-the-power-of…
Well everyone, that was fun and for my next task, I will solve the mystery of the missing left sock from my dryer…that could take hours.
whew, your comment has more words than my post.
thanks for doing some research on the topic
FinancialAid.com – Xedoc Holding
LowFare.com – xedoc
FinancialAide.com – xedoc
Floor.com – xedoc
Shoppers.com – xedoc
Modern.com – PetsUnited, LLC
Camps.com – National A-1 Advertising
AutoClassifieds.com – National A-1 Advertising
I’m not sure if any of these companies ever sell domains ?? (at least not publically)
.
Yeah, all this info about the E8 number is pretty much accurate but despite the esoteric nuance of the number its function is – well – “different”.
At some point I was contacted by Mr. Demas and unfortunately I cannot disclose anything on his plans for the domain(s).
Everybody sells…
It make sense these aren’t developed. I’m sure they make plenty parked. I’m all for development but sometimes it doesn’t make sense. If I owned Invest.com the LAST thing I would do is develop it, it prob makes bank parked and if developed you risk looking like it’s off the table for resale.
Besides, for a name like that you would need more than the purchase price to dev properly.
Even more interesting is there’s even more unreported sales that are in this realm and parked. . .
Very true. DNJournal only reports about half of the sales. A lot of high end sales are made private.
I really can not understand why LowFare.com sold for that much just to be parked! You would have thought that whoever bought it would have a plan, but I guess not.
You can add taxes.com to the list..
How much did that one sell for and when?
Some impressive numbers….but it doesn’t surprise me that they aren’t developed that is the status quo. However, the feeling that I was getting at DOMAINfest in LA was that more and more domainers were looking into development. I want to say that having a developed site that brings in 100,000+ visitors is much more powerful (a great domain name plus a community). I think that we will see a growing trend with development and content rich sites.
http://www.thedomainscene.com
I’ve been on the receiving end of hard-sell, cold telemarketing calls, where some idiot called me tried to sell me this domain for $50,000: fatsurgery.com
Oddly, my client was actually thinking about buying the domain name (really…). That’s why they called me in.
I was curious as to how much of a rip-off this was, so I had the sales people call me back the next day. In the meantime, I did some research…
The keyphrase only gave an estimated ~300 visitors per YEAR for that (the SEO benefit of that domain name is nonexistant). Amazingly, the traffic report included in the proposal showed a whopping “~250 people per year” that accidentally hit their landing page, and they tried to sell this as a benefit! Even if that is true (which I seriously doubt), those people are hardly what I would call “qualified traffic…”.
My gut tells me that a lot of those deals listed above are actually not PPC plays as much as slick salespeople screwing ignorant businessmen who have no idea about SEO.
Salesperson: “You know, if order to rank well in Google, you really need a website with the search term in the url.”
Sucker: “Really?”
Salesperson: “Really. Why do you think Amazon.com comes up first when you search for ‘Amazon’?”
The value of the domain name is strong, but not so strong that you can’t spend all that money instead on a brand new $10 domain and in actual marketing work and get much better rankings from a *whole bunch* of keyword phrases.
I’d love to talk with someone that spent an exorbitant amount of money and isn’t a sucker, just so that I can prove myself wrong, but until that happens…
To me they’re just Idiots and Suckers.