What makes a domain sellable, part 3
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Rick Latona June 16, 2008
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For part three of this installment let’s use a phrase that I hear so often in
business circles. Does it have legs?
For those of you that have English as your second language, you probably
haven’t heard this phrase very often. It means that when your site is up and
running, it’ll keep on running further and further. It implies that it can
continue to get bigger and more profitable as time goes on.
Recently I sold sanssouci.com for only $3900. I had originally thought it
would do more. It’s a suburb of Sydney, French for “carefree” and the palace of
Frederick the Great near Berlin. I’ve actually been there. Crazy dude wanted
Roman ruins in his backyard so he went and built his own. Funny thing is that
now those fake ruins are antiques because it was so long ago. Anyway, back on
topic, the name doesn’t have any legs. I should have known better. That’s why I
didn’t really make anything on it. How much can you make off such a name if you
owned it? I ended up selling it for its true market value.
SkiResorts.com on the other hand I sold (via Moniker to give credit where
credit is due) for $850,000. Just think. If you charged various resorts $10,000
a year to be listed on the site you would only need 100 customers to do
$1,000,000 dollars in revenue per year! This goes back to my first post in this
series which was about “the
obvious use of the name“.
A friend of mine runs Divorce.com. Any rookie domainer would agree that is a
great name but how great is it? Well, how many divorce lawyers are out there
which might pay 1000 a year to be listed? My guess is greater than 3,000 could
be talked into signing up. That would be 3 million a year in revenue! That my
friend, is legs.
So now that we have looked at the obvious use of the name and its emotional
curb appeal, make sure that you can accurately guage how big the oportunity
could be. How long those legs really are. Don’t fool yourself either. I’m sure
those 3,000 divorce lawyers are only a fraction of the 10,000 or more divorce
lawyers out there practicing law. I’m equally sure that it would be hard to get
more than 1000 dollars for them to list.
Be realistic. |