Yahoo to auction over 100 domain names ranging from $1,000 to $1.5 million | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo to auction over 100 domain names ranging from $1,000 to $1.5 million

thenextweb.com

29 pointsbjansn47 comments

> The company has simply decided it wants a quick revenue bump as these domains have likely hit their peak in value.

This is a ridiculous observation given that Yahoo has revenue in billions of USD, and no, selling domains for thousands of dollars will not be any kind of meaningful "quick revenue bump." Tech reporting at its finest right here.

The few that go for $1M might have some material impact.

OTOH, it is definitely the kind of tactic a division head uses to goose their numbers.

Did you not read the last paragraph?

> For a company that sees quarterly revenues of over a billion dollars, that’s not a big deal, but it definitely can’t hurt either.

Reading comprehension at its finest right here.

The statement is presented as a fact in the article, yet as even the author admits it is probably not true. So I would agree it is amateur journalism.

There's a world of difference between:

"The company has simply decided..."

and

"The company has probably decided..."

Tying the sale of these domains to Yahoo's quarterly revenues -- even bringing them up in the same sentence -- is the wrong context in which to discuss them in the first place. Even if Yahoo raises a million dollars from this sale, it'll have no material impact on the bottom line.

That said, there are other factors at play in a move like this: 1) PR value (it got the attention of the tech press, after all); 2) the sale of nonproductive assets for any sum greater than $0 isn't necessarily a bad thing. Even if it has no measurable effect on the quarterly results.

If I own a broken appliance that I lack the time, financial interest, or skill to fix -- but I can sell it to someone who can make use of it for a few bucks -- I might as well sell it. It won't make a dent in my yearly income, but it'll be better than holding onto the useless (to me) asset.

Direct link to the list of known domains for the fellow "enable javascript to see our content"-boycotters out there: http://cdn3.tnwcdn.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2013/11/...

A lot of them are good old (noun).com. Those seem valuable at first, but is that still the case? It used to be that people would build a brand around something like pets.com, but now it seems much more popular to create a brand name that is more identifiable and trademarkable.

Back in the day, before people understood how the web worked (or was going to work), those people generally assumed that recognizable nouns would (somehow) correlate to higher organic traffic -- as if someone looking to buy pet-related items would think to type "pets.com" into his URL field.

Search engines rendered that logic laughably naive, but I still think there could be some ancillary value in (noun).com as a recognizable and easily recalled domain name. I wouldn't overpay for one, but I wouldn't pass one up if the pricing made sense, and if I had actual plans to do something productive and value-adding with the name. (Buying domain names to squat and flip, under the "Greater Fool Theory," is a game I wouldn't recommend playing.)

On the other hand, the biggest non-technical challenge with buying a generic noun as a domain name is trademarking. Picking too generic a company name is setting oneself up for an uphill battle in today's trademark landscape.

Right, so sled.com is probably pretty good, but webserver.com is probably useless. Sled could easily be the name of an app (totally unrelated to sledding of course), but Web Server can't be anything because it's too technical to be useful for anything not related to web servers and too general to be useful for anything that actually is related to web servers.

webserver.com could be a nice personal domain for a blog or something, especially one related to http, etc. Though I would agree that the price it's going for seems inflated.

Agreed. The value of something hyper-specific and enterprise-sounding (webserver.com) is dubious at best. In the B2B sales and service business, having a generic domain name doesn't carry much upside, and what little measurable upside it does confer will be outweighed by downsides (such as the difficult registration and enforceability of the trademark).

Apropos of nothing, a domain like truestory.com is an interesting tossup. At the expected going rate of $25k+, it doesn't appear to make a lot of sense. But if someone were going to buy this name and develop it as a blogging or magazine format, I could see some value (again, barring trademark difficulties). As a writer and aspiring publisher, I'd scoop up this domain if it were priced within reason: say, the $1k-$5k range, tops. As a businessman, I'm a little gun-shy about the price tag.

Yeah, a good real-life example is hover.com. It's a domain registrar that has nothing to do with hovering, but it's a nice short dot-com that is pretty memorable.

The reason (noun).com domains are desirable is for SEO purposes. A few years ago, it was really easy to rank highly in Google for whatever keywords where in your domain name. For example, if you wanted to rank for [digital cameras] your best bet was to buy digitalcameras.com or some variation of that name.

As SEO has gotten more and more complex, exact match domains (EMDs) don't work quite as well anymore but are still a pretty big ranking signal [1].

For somebody worrying about long term brand appeal, an EMD might not make sense but for somebody launching a new ecommerce store or doing affiliate marketing EMDs are still a great asset to have.

[1] http://mozcast.com/metrics

EMD domains have lost most of their charm. Google's been giving them less and less preferential treatment over the past year. With a recent update some of my EMD sites took a big hit just for the EMD keyword - went from #1-#3 to second page.

> Those seem valuable at first, but is that still the case?

Probably not. The only one that springs to mind is diy.com, belonging to UK DIY retail supplier B&Q.

But no-one thinks to visit that domain, so in literature they have to suffix it with 'the website of B&Q'...

Ah, av.com. The good old redirect to altavista.com. I wonder how much they payed for that back in the days...

That was exactly my thought. Well is there anything left of the old altavista?

Well, there's DuckDuckGo, which is the search engine that reminds me of altavista the most.

There's the way the exclamation mark in the Yahoo! logo at altavista.com temporarily morphs into a mountain....

Here are some that caught my eye:

• webserver.com (250k-500k) • finalcountdown.com (10k-25k) • sandwich.com (50k-100k) • airtrafficcontrol.com (10k-25k)

I imagine sandwich.com might be a good asset for a chain sandwich restaurant (subway or quiznos, perhaps).

Maybe in 1999...but who actually types [thing I'm interest in].com into a web address bar these days? Even my grandma knows better than that by now.

Its not about typing. Its about cool name I guess. Everyone loves and remember a cool name. When you remember things, you communicate that easily and more often. Good for marketing I suppose

It might sense if they planned to base base a product and a campaign on the acquisition. "Introducing: The Sandwich (tm)" That kind of thing.

As the sly boots behind webserver.io I wouldn't mind that first one.. 250K is a bit more than my standard walking around money though

I really hope the producers of Arrested Development buy finalcountdown.com

Seems more likely that Yahoo is preparing to take a write-down on a collection of assets and is trying to mitigate the total amount by auctioning off the leftovers.

I guess they're still holding on to broadcast.com. $5 billion for a 301 to yahoo.com, maybe they're waiting for the right buyer.

Webcal.com for $5000? That seems way too cheap.

This article reminded me how mammals.org would redirect to Apple. I just tested it and it doesn't work any longer. :(

Mostly significantly over valued. They will draw attention though so maybe they'll get high prices.

Yahoo is cleaning up the house before vacating it and relocating elsewhere. This is just a garage sale.

Fellow HN'ers,

I had purchased a domain which I'm planning to Sell now. (iAppleService.com)

I'm totally new to this Domain Selling business.

- How do you guys proceed to find the Right buyer? Can someone share their experience. Looking for help.

That looks like a prime candidate for a lawsuit over Apple's trademarks.

Thanks. is it so?

Apple's service is very poor here in India. They just don't care for second world countries. And I had purchased this for that reason. I like to give it away, if goes for a good cause.

Apple's service is poor in India because they are required by law to partner with Indian retailers to sell their products. These restrictions might be lifting though, I recently read that Wal-Mart would have a retail presence in India.

I'm going to be blunt -- that domain is not worth much. It seems to have no current revenue stream, isn't a particularly high value phrase or term, has no existing link equity from an SEO standpoint, and is borderline (if not blatantly) at risk for trademark issues.

You could try some domain auction sites, but I just want you to keep your expectations in check.

why the downvotes? I asked for genuine help in here.

probably because people here don't like domain squatters (it sounds like you bought the domain purely to sell it at a profit)

I wonder how much legacy code can be pushed malware using one of these.

Honestly, I think this is great. Let these solid domains get used.

jumpcut was an amazing tool. I wish they didn't deadpool it.

Why buy westerns.com when you could buy .westerns instead?

surprised not to see broadcast.com on there.

truestory.com sounds cool

truestorybro.com sounds more complete

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