Looking back on 2 Years of Domainvestors.tv!

It’s incredible to think that I started this blog almost two years ago! October 18th is the official two-year anniversary of the blog so I thought now would be a good time to look-back and reflect on the last two years on Domainvestors.tv. For the first year and a half this blog was known as DomainFlipBlog but the name changed in April of 2009 as the focus had really changed from Domain Flipping to Domain Investing.

So what better way to be nostalgic than to look back on some of my early posts! If you’d like to take a walk down memory lane you can read the post below from November of 2007. This is when I really first started experimenting with domain listing services.

What is interesting to see from this post is that at the time I was really certain that if you put a domain up for sale – it sells! While I was selling some domains with Sedo – it was nowhere near what I had initially expected. This was when I was buying domains left-and-right and still very naive about the entire concept of domain value.  It’s amazing to look back and think that at the time I thought I really got it! Looking-back now it is incredible to see how much I’ve learned over the last two years.

One more funny note about this post – I mention using Sedo’s appraisal service instead of GoDaddy’s – this is when I still thought that if your domain is appraised for a particular amount you can sell it for that price to anyone. Now the only time I appraise domains is with Moniker around tax time as these are the only appraisals accepted by the IRS – fun fact if you didn’t know that! As for using appraisals in my sales strategy – forget it!

So take a walk down memory lane with me and read one of my early posts back in November of 2007:

I use Sedo for all of my domain sales, they have been the core service enabling my domain  transactions. Sedo seem to be one of the most popular sites with big-money (over $50,000/name) transactions taking place regularly. Sedo’s domain appraisal service is definitely several notches above GoDaddy’s with a very thorough analysis of your domain, exposing the multitude of components that determine a domains price.  My main complaint about Sedo is that their user interface is difficult to navigate and a bit archaic. Simple tasks that you should be able to do yourself oftentime requiring emailing support. A good example is if you list a domain and later put a website on the domain, you cannot edit your listing to reflect that the domain is being sold with the developed site. Instead you have to email customer service and have them change it for you.
So lately I have been trying to find an alternative to Sedo that could offer even more great exposure for my domains. I discovered Afternic which is another popular domain sale site. I found-out about afternic through buydomains.com which seems to be just a shell on top of afternic. Afternic is quite similar to Sedo however has a much more functional (albeit still a bit clunky) UI. It was much easier to add domains and change options or re-listing a domain. Afternic has more extensive promotion tools right out of the gate allowing you to opt for expanded promotion in trade for increased commission. Domains easy get lost in the millions of domains on Sedo so its nice to see this option available.
I have featured listings running on both Sedo and Afternic this month for freqentflier.mobi. I am looking to get an offer a bit north of $3,000. It will be interesting to compare the amount of traffic my domain listing gets on each service. This will provide some very useful information as to which service really has the most effective marketing program.

Oh – and just so you know – of course FrequentFlier.mobi didn’t sell for $3K! In fact I still own the domain – I’ve let most of my .mobi’s drop since this is NOT an area I think has much investment potential. That being said this domains has special nostalgic value so to me it’s been deemed priceless!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton