WW.com Sold in Private
domaininvesting.com
domaininvesting.com
While to others it might sound like you are taking a hit my guess is that you simply got a good enough number that you decided not to go for door number two. Which could be 5 years down the road or never.
The market for this type of name is basically the following:
a) A non chinese domain investor (good luck getting anything north of 350k from one of those).
b) A chinese investor (in which case all bets are off after all they buy numeral domains for ridiculous amounts). I've sold to a ton of these guys.
c) A startup (but not going to pay a million for a domain).
d) Some company that needs those initials.
e) Some major company that needs a brand name. And hopefully doesn't have a trademark but has a budget.
As such (as we both know) you can wait forever for the right person or company to come along. So if someone throws you a million(s) for the name you are going to think long and hard about not taking the money.
And the fact that, say, some billion dollar company wants it doesn't mean they will part with millions to buy it.
Anyway congratulations.
This has been a long time in the works (years), and it's been an interesting but sometimes tiring affair. The obvious candidates to buy it have all had their chance, compared to what other 2L domains have sold for I think my asking price was quite reasonable. I think I understand why this particular party bought it and what their strategy is, so I understand the deal from the buyers perspective in so far as this is possible.
For my side the short version of the story is risk/return analysis, I've made a good bit of money from the exploitation of the domain, I could have kept it and re-targeted it to some new purpose or sell it outright and re-invest the proceeds in some other way. Domains are a fickle thing, you're always operating by the grace of some other party.
Another way to look at this transaction is that the sale of the domain instantly brought about 20 years worth of revenues without the associated costs.
I've got many other reasons for selling, after all, a two letter domain is 'just 16 bits' and I think bits have in the end limited utility, as a brand it was useful but not spectacularly so. Though no doubt someone else could have milked it for much more (for instance, by making it a porn site). I'm fairly tired of the whole webcam concept (no matter what you do, it tends to trend to a porn site unless you feel like babysitting it 24x7) and have been very busy with other concepts in the last couple of months.
The Due-Diligence work is also quite demanding, letting this go to me was not hard once the decision was made. I will miss my ultra-short email address.
I'll do what I can to keep the users happy and the site up in the air, the deserve nothing less, their loyalty over the years has been astounding.
As far as "20 years worth of revenues" I had a domain related to the mortgage business where I was offered an amount of money that was, let's call it, 4 years worth of revenues. This was in iirc 2006/7 prior to the crash when those terms were paying tons of money. After the crash literally no income worth mentioning. Obviously in retrospect wish I had taken the offer. But at the time it didn't seem like the mortgage landscape downside would be anywhere near what it turned out to be.
The new tlds, the fact that the domain name system as such is expanding all the time and that urls are fewer and fewer typed in makes me believe that 'shortness' is not so much a factor today as it was in the early days. You can get a two letter (not .com) for very little money.
The LG deal still baffles me, though I can see with that being their brand they probably had little choice. But no company is literally called 'ww', not even mine (It is Camarades BV) so from that point of view a really large figure was probably not going to happen any time soon.
The big difference is whether you approach the buyer or whether the buyer approaches you.
"A price is never right, if you sold it was too cheap, if you didn't it was too expensive.". I'm happy with this sale, it's a ton of money and since I normally live without a safety net this will help a lot with my sleeping disorder.
That Icann announcement of a trademark dispute, fake infringement suit (it's been tried), DHS seizure and all these other bad things that can happen to domains worry me a lot less today than they did yesterday.
Attempt to sell them. That's the only way you can establish the value of anything.
One easy way to get an idea is by looking at recent transactions for similar domains (do not look at the asking prices, they are typically not realistic).
> And secondly how do I go about finding buyers?
There are many ways to attract buyers, advertising, auctions, brokers, messages on the domain itself, a blog post. Whatever you feel is required.
If people are approaching you to buy them that is one indicator of value.
In general domains are a numbers game. If you own a large quantity of decent names you might sell 1% of them a year. Whether you get a good number totally depends on how you do the negotiation that's a huge factor.
In general it's pretty difficult to outbound sell domains especially if you don't know the business to be able to size up and potential buyers.
Having a 'nice' phone number was really important at some point, easy to remember. Now we all have address books.
The DNS is nice, it works well and I'm sure that it will continue to work well for a long time. But gtlds are the same as area codes and I have absolutely no idea what having an area code of '1' would mean for a business that is not in the United States.
.coms used to be pretty much the standard, I see many more people launching more and more successful businesses on non .com domains. Given enough time (ok, probably a lot) the weight of a .com will likely reduce to the point where it is just another identifier. Maybe we'll all be scanning QR codes, maybe browsers will in fact hide the domain, maybe at some point you'll never type on in again.
I'm not saying the DNS will die completely, I just think that the length of a domain will not be as important any more. But if you brand happens to be LL then you'd better have LL.com, that probably is a given for the foreseeable future. Weight Watchers, World Wildlife Foundation and World Wrestling are obvious contenders but even they were not interested. So now some Chinese company will run with it, I'm curious how they will fare and what they will do with it.
For me a domain is a requirement, just like hosting is a requirement. Camarades.com became an instant hit and it was very hard to spell. Google wasn't even a proper word before it was used as a brand (they miss-spelled googol) and now it is almost a verb. Facebook is an ugly juxtaposition of two otherwise unrelated words. If ww.guru is your thing and wwguru.com is free then for the $10 or so you really should just take it. But if the .com is taken just ignore it and find another one. In the end a domain is an identifier, it is the service behind it that matters most. So if you plan on starting an escrow service it helps if you can obtain escrow.com. But if you can't I would not worry about it, there are tons of options.
I've yet to see a service succeed just on the strength of the domain, and I've seen plenty of services with great domains fail. A good domain can help but will not be the defining factor of a success.
In general, buying a great domain with the hope of selling it later for more money is a bad idea. Unless you can steal it and the chance of that happening is slim. And you can wait 5 or 10 years or never for the "right" buyer to come along.
You need a large number of domains to be able to hold them and sell them later on if that is what you are trying to do.
http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/program-status/delegated-string...
Jesus - who came up with these?
Also - anyone know where you can register any domains with these new delegations? Is it on a registrar-by-registrar basis?
The new TLDs are doing really poorly in terms of end-user adoption: http://www.ricksblog.com/2014/06/rick-schwartz-equation/
Now if I can only sell my 2 letter domain for that...
I'm pretty sure you could. What domain do you have?
But if you follow the links the site premiumurls.net redirects to twitter and the whois info is private (and why does it need to be?)
If he is really good at what he does then why is that, other than trying to operate in some kind of stealth mode?
How did you hear about him originally I can't find out that much about him. (I am finding that history records indicate a woman was attached to that domain name and it seems odd that someone would pick a .net like that..)
Feel free to refer to me as the link-up (or reference this thread).
I completely understand someone that does not have a very public service in a high stakes market. Being extremely visible is not always helpful. But he's earned his spot in the light on this one and since it's easy to find him through tfa I'm sure he's ok with his contact info being listed here.
A good domain only have the economic strength and strategic vision of the business or individual reservations!"
Was this what jacquesm had on there or is this post aquisition? For some reason I found it quite funny.
Let me explain what drives this process. The buyer here is a Chinese company that somehow magically can move millions of $US to the other side of the world. Most Chinese companies, even those that have lots of $US can not do that, they run into the $50K/year barrier that the Chinese central bank has set up.
So by buying domains abroad and then offering them to Chinese buyers that can not move their $ outside of China these people will make a substantial profit on their deal. And I don't think it takes too much imagination to figure out why they can move money out of China when everybody else can not.
It's very nice to look at all your dollars in a Chinese bank account when you can't do anything with them unless you go through the 'happy few'.
Think of the effect a bank run would have if all those people demanded to actually see their dollars ostensibly kept in Chinese dollar accounts. That would have some interesting effects, but I hope the day will not come while I'm alive.
Edit: I'm curious why the HN handle of the seller was removed from the post. To me that is an added point of interest and relevant.
It sometime happens that a story makes it to the front page because of some bait that was added to the title (in this case, to add social curiosity where intellectual interest was lacking), whereupon a moderator removes the bait from the title. This is not a bad pattern if you think about it. It's ok for the front page to have a few such stories, but they shouldn't dominate it. And once a story makes the front page, it should stand on its own.
As the person who posted the story I would have posted it regardless of whether Jacques was involved or not. But of course I definitely recognized that if I included his name it would have a much better chance of garnering interest.
Two samples:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4328367
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3214397
But those were not on 'your watch' so I'm 100% on board with your new policy.
Quite a few blog posts carry the name of the blogger in the domain as well, which emphasizes personality rather than content, that's going to be harder to get rid of.
Anyway, I didn't even expect this to be on HN at all, it's been a roller coaster month of negotiations and traveling, I'm happy it's done. Now to repair the website, amazing how many dependencies on a domain name creep in over the years!
For the benefit of others on HN although I've never received a quote from a broker to market a 2l which I own I have on other domains. Generally anywhere from 7 to 15%. I've also had brokers take a haircut to close a deal.
On the buy side godaddy had recently sold one of my names (I almost blew them off but found they were clueless enough that it really worked to my advantage) and I'm seeing they get 10% when they represent sellers.
(note that ww.com was not squatted on, i know that. i am just asking in general why a price cap is a bad idea for resale.)
And super-valuable domains are minuscule portion of overall domain sales, it simply wouldn't be worthwhile.
And it need not be a "sale of a domain" at all; it can be the sale of "ww.com corp", which owns the domain, without any domain transfer at all.
Should we start capping the amounts that startups can be acquired for? If FB is willing to pay 1B for Instagram, 19B for Whatsapp, or more - who's to say that they can't spend their money the way they want to?
AFAIK, there are regulations already for how much you can pollute your environment, usage of rivers, height of buildings, rearchitecting your house etc.
Next thing you know you're going to have to declare your 'five year plan' when you register a domain...
Also, I'm not sure what you mean with 'public resource' in this context, domains are more like private registries held by semi-official companies that you can choose to do business with or not.
There is a near infinity of them, shorter ones are obviously in short supply but to date I've never ever had a problem buying a domain for a new project for $8 or so.
And regarding the public resource, it really is a public resource. You may have to go through a registrar, but it is open for any and all to register. In the case of "squatters", it is the same as attempting to rent a parking space. Something meant for the public to use which requires a nominal fee.
Why even "apologize" like that? You don't have to.
For some reason people seem to think that there could be a cost effective way to truly determine what the best use of each and every domain name is and allocate it to the truly deserving users!.
And that if that was even done then a user with more money wouldn't then come along later and buy it from that person by paying them money.
You know I remember way back in 2001 - I think it was. And I would have attorney's contact me wanting to know if they could use law.com for their website. You know as if they just woke up one morning, had this idea, and nobody else thought of using law.com for the same purpose. They were the first! That's how little they knew about the internet prior to that thought.
Likewise, many startups seem frustrated that the name that they want is being held for ransom by some other person. As if nobody else would have come along and used it for their business and they wouldn't be able to use it.