Advisory: Sell Your 3 Letter Domains

June 7, 2008

There is a mantra among domainers: “shorter is better.” And to a large extent, when speaking about domain names, this is true (although some say that it’s not how short your domain is, but what you do with it, that matters).

Following this mantra has paid off handsomely for many domainers. The value of three letter dot com domains has soared in recent years. According to the leading site for tracking prices for 3 letter domains, 3Character.com, the minimum wholesale price of an LLL.com has gone from $3,700 to $7,600 in the last year. That’s more than doubling your money in just one year – a rate of return that’s hard to beat.

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Great Domains Auction

February 28, 2008

With all the concern lately about the domain market softening, I watched the auction that ended today at GreatDomains closely. Except for a few good names, there did not seem to be very enthusiastic bidding.

Here are the final results that I saw (unofficial results). Some of the names were regular Sedo auctions that were closing at the same time:

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Interview of Larry Kutscher, CEO of Register.com on Front Running by Network Solutions

January 17, 2008

I discussed in a recent post that Network Solutions had started front running domains. To gain more of a perspective on the issue, I spoke with Larry Kutscher, CEO of Register.com, a leading domain name registrar, about his views on the matter. Here is what he had to say:

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Looking Back and Looking Forward

December 20, 2007

2007 is fast coming to an end. It’s a time for reflection – both of what has happened in the past and what may happen in the future.

Sahar has a couple of excellent posts about the early days of domaining. He starts out by discussing which domainer started out the earliest. He mentions Chris Hartnett who then proceeds to give one of the most interesting stories I have ever heard about the early days of the domain industry. Well worth a read.

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About Us

December 20, 2007

I’ve finally gotten around to writing a proper “About Us” page for Domain Bits. If you’re curious about the author of the blog, you can check it out.

Also, please take a moment to introduce yourself. I’d really like to get to know the readers of my blog.

Race of the Domain Extensions – Which Increases in Value Fastest?

December 5, 2007

You can make money from a variety of strategies in domains – but what’s the domain extension that increases in value the fastest? I’ve tried to crunch some hard figures to answer this question.

The most comprehensive resource we have as to what the domain market is are the reports in the Domain Name Journal. For this study, I’ve used the year to date sales chart (well, the year is almost over) for 2007, as well as the 2006, 2005 and 2004 price charts to determine the market. I realize that a lot of sales do go unreported, but this is really the best information that is available. As well, the unreported information should not significantly affect results, as it would be consistent from year to year, and I’m focussing on changes between years.

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What All Domainers Ought to Know About Overture

November 7, 2007

If there is one tool you will be using a lot as a domainer, it’s the Overture tool, found here.

What is an Overture Score?

To help pay per click advertisers choose appropriate terms to bid on, the Yahoo! network keeps track of all of the keywords that were searched on their network, and how often they are searched. They make this data publicly available on the Overture tool. This tool allows you to input a keyword and then outputs how often in a previous month that keyword and similar keywords were searched. The number of times the keyword was searched is known as the “Overture score.” So, for instance, if today you search the Overture tool for the keyword “widget,” it will tell you that this keyword was searched 20,455 times in a previous month.

You will sometimes hear the term “Overture with extension.” This means that the full domain name, including the extension, was searched for on the Overture network. So, for instance, if today you search the Overture tool for the keyword “ebay.com,” it will tell you that this keyword was searched 2,849,826 times in a previous month.

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Registering New Domains for Profit

November 6, 2007

A wonderful video released today by 45n5.com about making lots of money just from registering domains. I think that, if done intelligently, you could double your money in a year (emphasis on making sure you know what you’re doing first). Here’s the video:

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