As you all know by now I couldn’t make it to Miami this year and I’m bummed that I’m missing what looks like an incredible conference. As always I’ve been using Ron Jackson’s DNJournal as my main source for catching as much of the excitement as I can from across the computer screen.
If you can’t make it to a conference you should always read as much as you can because you never know what little tidbits of information could provide inspiration for your own business. Of course there is absolutely no replacement for being there but missing both the show and the blog posts could cause you to miss some major trends.
Now that I’m stepping-up my game selling domains I am paying even closer attention to what sells in auctions at shows like TRAFFIC. We can all learn from what sells and what doesn’t sell and with each auction results I get more insight into pricing of my own domains.
I’m getting the auction results from DNN (one of my favorite blogs) that was there live-blogging the results. In total 49/219 domains sold which means that almost one quarter of the names sold – not too shabby! The total sales number was just shy of $500,000 which I know is low for what was expected. So let’s dig in a bit, see what sold, and I’ll provide my initial analysis of what this tells us about the domain sales market.
Before I get started it’s important to understand that this is just my analysis and by no means constitute expert advice or even the right analysis – it’s just my thoughts!
According to my rough count 20 of the 49 domains sold were non .com. This is a VERY surprising result for me as I expected non .com sales to make-up a much smaller proportion of the inventory that sold.
There was definitely some nice interest in product domains which is a trend I’ve been following this year – below are a few of the product domains that sold in the auction:
GolfSets.net – $1,900
KingBeds.com – $8,200
Deppresants.com – $3,000
OxygenTanks.com – $13,000
FloridaOranges.com and Florida-Oranges.com – $8,000
Along with product domains I was surprised to see the interest in “i” domains – domains that start with the letter “i”. I’ve always turned a blind eye to these however after seeing the results here it is clear there are some buyers in the space, here are some of the “i” domain sales:
iCallCenter.com – $600
iExports.com – $500
iProgramming.com – $800
iPlanning.com – $1,300
iMover.com – $400
Another interesting trend was the popularity of .CM domains in the auction. Now this might have had to do with the low price-points but still I’m surprised with how many .cm names sold…is there something I don’t know? (It can’t be the typo traffic since I’ve heard from plenty of people that the typo traffic is insignificant on these names)
UsedCars.cm – $1,000
Dogs.cm – $700
Cats.cm – $800
Free.cm – $500
VideoGames.cm – $500
FreeStuff.cm – $500
In general looking at the results it looks like there are a lot of buyers in the $500 – $10,000 range but significantly less once you get above 10K which isn’t surprising but should tell you why you aren’t moving any names if you’re pricing all of them above $10,000.
So if you are trying to sell domains (like I am) you should be picking through auctions like these, comparing some of the names that sold to your own, and hopefully learning and modifying your strategy to fit the market. I’m still a newbie when it comes to selling domains but like a good sponge I’m learning and look forward to sharing some big sales with all of you sometime soon.
For now I’ve been enjoying over 2K/month in sales which after starting with $0/month is a nice plus business to add onto my real business – monetization. Still, I don’t think I’d ever want to do the sales game as a long-term thing, I’m just too darn addicted to passive income 🙂
Feel free to share your own thoughts, feedback, or analysis of the auction. We can all learn from each other, and hopefully sell more together!
