PokerRooms.co.uk $22,000
Bandwidth.co.uk $12,225
BestSlots.co.uk $ 4,483
eStore.co.uk $ 4,401
YourSpace.co.uk $ 4,075
Poker-Sites.co.uk $ 3,260
Teckentrup.co.uk $ 2,445
EducationalFurniture.co.uk $ 2,445
4Sight.co.uk $ 1,630
AutoFinders.co.uk $ 1,223
eCamp.co.uk $ 1,100

Some nice solid sales.

Cruises.co.uk £560,000 ($1,099,798)
Phones.co.uk £175,000 ($344,710)
FreeCreditReport.co.uk $300,000
4×4.co.uk £38,500 ($75,360)
FreeCreditReports.co.uk $70,000
BusinessNetwork.co.uk £21,500 ($41,000)
LegalJobs.co.uk £20,000 ($39,392)
GiftIdeas.co.uk $37,950
KGB.co.uk £18,000 ($35,600)
Glow.co.uk £20,010 ($31,015)
Flirting.co.uk €18,000 [euro] ($26,240)
DiscountTravel €16,000 [euro] ($23,633)
Searchers.co.uk £10,000 ($20,520)
ClassicCars.co.uk £10,100 ($19,897)
PetrolPrices.co.uk £8,600 ($17,028)

Some good sales over the $100,000 mark. Its also worth comparing these sales with domain sales during 2007.

Here are a few domain name related links to explore over the holiday period.

To start off here is one for people interested in geo domains. This is an interesting story of how geodomains are being used in the US online dating industry. Next, Predictive Domaining outlines the risks to Geo-domains, in an interesting article that covers many of the likely risks.

Now I’ve been visiting DNJournal.com for years but rarely ventured further than their domain sales listings and occasionally their headline article. Recently I noticed that they have a section called “The Lowdown”, that I had not noticed before. The Lowdown section is worth visiting as it contains lots of news articles about the domain name industry you don’t find elsewhere.

Here are two interesting articles from the Online Journalism Review website. They are slightly out of date but have plenty to offer domainers. the first is a 2006 article City dot-coms still waiting to strike it rich, which will be of particluar interest to anyone wanting to understand Geodomains.   This article from OJR, How to make money on your news content website, is aimed at journalists, but has lots to offer domain developers.

Happy reading!

Perhaps the most important event this month was ICANN’s decison to relax the rules about naming domain name extensions. Now anyone with enough cash can buy their own domain extension. So we could easily see new top level domains like .sex, .london and .eBay. Is this a disaster waiting to happen or will this open up the pool of available domains. See what expert domainer Elliot Silver has to say on this development  and see what other people are saying about ICANN’s decision in this post on TheDomains.com blog.  

Meanwhile, the Self Made Minds blog has a post that offers some tips for domainers thinking of leasing rather than selling their domains. Once you have read this, read this post about domain leasing agreements and then look at leaseadomain.co.uk/. This is all very early in the development of this market, and I would recommend that you get yourself a good lawyer before taking the plunge in this highly speculative area. This is one area novice domainers should avoid completely.

Next, here is a short introduction in how to use the Wordpress blogging platform to build sites that actually look like sites, rather than blogs. This will be especially useful for domainers who want to develop domains into minisites, for example.

Many domainers are taking their best domains and developing them into fully fledged websites. These new internet entrepreneurs have learned how they can make a decent income by either selling their domain with its established website for good money or by developing their domains and enjoying good regular incomes. I like reading about successful internet entrepreneurs and this article How I Built A Six Figure Internet Income about the income potential of blogs, from the Financial Hack blog, is quite inspiring.

Finally, this post about domain name appraisals on the Domain Junkie blog is well worth reading. It compares domain name appraisals from Moniker and Sedo and recommends obtaining appraisals from two trusted sources before negotiating a price for a domain.

Once your site is up and running you look at how to market your website. The name you have chosen is the best you could find, and you may even be able to rank well when people type in ‘Daves Car Spare Parts’ into the Google search box, but few people type this in, anyway. What is worse its hard to say over the telephone and its not that easy to remember.

So if you cannot get a reasonably generic domain for your business, what can you do?

The problem is one that many, many businesses face and there is a trend developing that may have serious implications for domain names and domaining.

According to trend monitoring website  The Trendwatch, the solution Japanese businesses in this situation are starting to adopt is interesting, to say the least.  There is an emerging trend for Japanese businesses to optimize their sites for specific keywords and promoting the keywords people should use to search for their business in advertising, as well as the site URL:-

It turns out that search boxes seem to be the latest thing in advertising all over the little island, and have been for the past few months. Not only do they list the URL, but they also place a search box in the ad, with the keywords already placed.

So the business in our example just needs to pick some memorable keywords and encourage people to search on these words such as ‘car spares’, ‘a1 parts’ or even ‘Daves spares’.

I think that trends like this pose a significant threat to the value of generic domains. If its going to cost me $2,600,000 for a domain like Pizza.com but I can rank no 1 in Google for ‘love pizza’ at a fraction of that price annually, then I am going to at least consider the cheaper option. Furthermore, for many businesses this might be their only option. Keywords are back but this time its serious.

The number of blogs dealing with 3, 4 and 5 character domain names is increasing all the time.

If you are interested in this area then perhaps your first stop should be 3Character.com. There is an associate fact site called Three Letter Domains that is worth reading as well.

There are a number of four character domain name websites, worth visiting, which include:-

4ltr.org - a resources, information and marketplace website for 4 letter domains.

4LetterNoob - the 4 letter domain name blog of Namepros.com moderator Reece Berg

QuadLetterDomains -  Market trends, news and personal experience of four letter domains for enthusiasts and investors.

LLLLdotcom.com – a 4 letter domain name blog

tdvr.com - Top Domain Valuation Report

There are also two interesting sites covering 5 character domains:-

FiveComs – specialises in the sale of five letter dot coms.

NNNNNDomains.com - provides countdown, sales data and trends information for 5 number (NNNNN) domain names

These are the ones I have found and I beleive there are other sites emerging all the time.

Are there any sites that I have missed out? Do you know of a site that covers this area well? Tell us what you think in the comments section below…………..

The US based firm provides geo-targeted adverts in a number of countries including the US, Canada and the UK. Chitika announced on their blog last week that they are looking into offering a customizable “Chitika for domains” service. 

Chitika is a welcome alternative to existing domain name parking services such as that provided by Sedo.com and Parked.com.

There are not very many parking options catering to domainers with domain names getting UK traffic and the results from Sedo’s parking service is felt by some to provide only modest results.  So this is a welcome opportunity for domainers with .uk domain names and/ or UK traffic.

I will be monitoring this development and revisit it shortly.

In the mean time what do you think of Chitika’ plans. Is this a product that might interest you? What other parking services are there for UK traffic? Share your thoughts below.

If you have the ‘right stuff’, you can help Nominet spend £5 million of its profits. They have decided to set up something called the Nominet Foundation ‘to better utilise (Nominet’s surpluses) to…

provide public benefits to UK Internet stakeholders with an emphasis on ensuring the proper use and availability of the internet, education, information technology, and research and development projects particularly for the young, the elderly and the socially deprived’.

So they need 4 trustees to help them spend the dosh, er, allocate the surplus. In addition to strong interpersonal skills you will need a commitment to the objectives of the Foundation and the ability to communicate effectively with the key stakeholder groups and an understanding of the aims of the Foundation and its partners i.e. research, academia and Internet users and stakeholders. So nothing too difficult there!

More details about Nominet can be found here and you can find out more about the vacancies, here. Oh yes, the deadline for applications is March 28th 2008.

It appears that around 50% have been registered so far and I must admit I am tempted to add to my modest holding. I have to say that even though four letter .nets are a longer term hold I am actively looking for any decent unregistered domains.

The hottest topics on the domain name discussions forums concern 3 and four letter domain names and the hype surrounding 4 letter .nets gets ever more frenetic.

The forum Namepros.com now has a short domain name section covering domains shorter than 5 characters such as “LLL, LLLL, L-L-L, 2c, 3c, acronyms, etc”. The LLLL.net countdown thread can be found here  and a more sober appraisal of the market for LLLL.nets is being discussed on DomainState.com, here.

There are also a number of bloggers reporting on the LLLL market, such as GFNB.net, the LLLL.net countdown website and QuadLetterDomains.com . Also worth having a look at 4letternoob’s blog.

If you want to find out more about LLLL.nets you may find this article from DailyDomainer.com is worth reading .

People who missed the LLL.com, L-L-L.com and LLLL.com gold-rushes want to get on the bandwagon. So do those who did well out of previous goldrushes and who want to repeat the experience with LLLL.nets.

However, not all domainers feel that way and a fairly large note of caution is required here. The demand for LLLL.net domains is different to that for LLLL.coms. If someone is looking for a four letter .com domain for their business, an alternative for that person may not be the same domain in a .net. What I mean is that a business called UKGB, which wants to buy UKGB.com but cannot because it is too expensive or in use already, may not see UKGB.net as a preferred alternative. For example, they may feel that a dot com is more memorable for their target market and if they use UKGB.net they are sending traffic to the dot com version. For them the preferred alternative may be ‘UKGBClothes.com’ or ‘UKGBProperty.com’ or whatever, depending on their business.

As I have said before I think LLLL.nets do have a market and news of some profitable sales to end users have been encouraging. The lure of a short memorable 4 letter domain in any extension will be too strong for some end users and so LLLL.nets will sell. However, in my opinion, in general, they need to be considered as longer term holds rather than a way to make quick money.

I think we should expect to see a modest increase in values as soon as the last LLLL.nets are gone. But when might we expect decent returns? Might we be looking at 6 – 12 months before the last ones are gone? After that there could be years of only modest price appreciation. Also, bear in mind that .nets have sold for 20% – 40% of the equivalent .com.

So this is a long term investment and in my opinion only jump aboard if you are prepared to invest five or more registration fees for each name held, over the next five years before having even a chance of satisfactory returns.

So what do you think? When will the last .nets available to register run out? Are they going to appreciate rapidly, modestly or not at all? Are you jumping aboard or not? Tell us why.
 

The million dollar UK domain name. Perhaps the biggest news item of recent weeks is that the sale of Cruises.co.uk broke the record for the most expensive UK domain name. The buyer, who also owns cruise.co.uk,  paid in the region of $1 million, which is about £560,000.

Next – here is a question. Anyone heard that there might be a recession? Well there has been a lot of speculation about how a possible recession might affect domain names. At the time of writing it seems like the majority of economic commentators think there is a good chance that we will slip into a prolonged recession. So if it does happen what might be the possible impacts on our domaining activities. Paul Sloan writing in the US business journal Fortune Magazine says that domain names may be recession proof. I dont think he is right and neither does Mark Jeftovic, from easyDNS.com. His appraisal of the possible impacts is well worth reading.

King Domainer Rick Schwartz had a cool interview in Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald    

Social networking site MySpace recently won what might become a landmark decision after it won a case against the owner of MySpace.co.uk. Importantly, the owner obtained the domain many years before the site MySpace was created.Scott from the entrepreneurs blog Self Made Minds is an active domainer with some great names in his portfolio. He recently blogged about an domain name appraisal he received from domain name sales site SEDO.co.uk and reproduces the appraisal, which makes interesting reading. It is interesting to see what a Sedo appraisal takes into account. Scott is kind enough to share his domaining strategies on his blog. Here he taks about turning down an offer of $57,000 for a few of his domain names. Finally, domainers who use eBay for buying and selling domains will be interested to read how eBay now stops sellers leaving negative feedback for buyers. Whether this is a good idea that will improve the user experience or just lead to a increase in non – paying bidders remains to be seen.