Last week I attended the TRAFFIC conference in Miami, a jam packed few days for people who own domain names to make money and those who offer services around that. You’re all seen the type of website.. you type in something random, put ‘.com’ on the end and a site full of adverts come up. Click on some of those ads and the site owner makes some money. This is also known as direct navigation, as opposed to search navigation where you search for a term and click on the results. Another variant of this is typos – misspellings of popular domain names or common words such as ‘consult‘.
The basic idea is simple, a domain name is similar to property in that it can offer great exposure to your target audience. If you own 5th Avenue property you can expect it to be worth more than the deepest darkest depths of Long Island, and the same is true of domains. The trouble is in many cases you can’t work out why a domain is so popular, in others it’s obvious – for example domain auction, where Cameras.com was sold for $1.5 million. In fact I almost accidentally became the proud owner of Sailboat.com when, as a result of the previous night’s ‘networking’ I yawned and stretched at the wrong time… my $130,000 check – the amount I almost bid – might have bounced though.
Of course if someone is prepared to offer me $1 million for MattHobbs.com then maybe I could afford it. Go on… you know you want it!
Hey Matt,
Nice article — funny. I was at the TRAFFIC conference earlier this year in Vegas and sat next to an associate who bid $450,000 for sex.net. When he did that, I gave him a dirty look and laughed. I had just taken him and his crew and their wives to dinner the night before and picked up the tab. That’s probably why he had enough funds to cover his purchase. LOL wink wink.
Successclick