I don’t know where are we heading with NNNNN.coms

I see many 5N.coms dropping everyday though they are being caught instantly.
I see many sellers selling 5N.coms for $10 each which have almost a year before they expire.

Could someone throw some light on it

• I’ve done pretty well with my NNNNN.com’s in terms of traffic and sales. Given that they haven’t risen as much as I expected, I have sold a number of them and put my better ones (about 500) on multi-year registration. Given the overall economy and domain market, I wouldn’t expect any short-term movement of any significance, unless there is a big breakthrough in numeric domains (mobile searching using numerics, Chinese market rapidly expanding, etc.), which could happen any time.
• Answer will be shown ~45 days after mid-Feb which is when the buyout took place. If there are many drops then that is a sign that many people have given up in this sector. By looking at for sale postings in forums, it looks like many people have given up already and are trying to regain a few pennies from their initial investment before their names expire.

  Vultures will be flying ahead in March-April.

• I dropped half of mine and kept half. Kept the ones that got the most traffic, or that had some meaning to me. Numbers are universal so its worth keeping some.

I’m with a US university, and I’ll soon be getting approval to change the subdomain we use for one of our divisions, and I want to make durned sure I know all the ins and outs of the process- and what might get hosed by the change. Beyond registering the new subdomain through Uni administration and getting our DNS’s pointing traffic to our IP, I wanted to make sure the change wouldn’t break any of our web applications, sites, or services. I’ve gone through our pages fine-toothed, and weeded out all absolute URL’s referencing the old subdomain, making them all relative.

I’ve ID’d the redirects in Apache which will need to be changed, and I’ve marked down the ServerName for change as well. As far as I can ascertain, MySQL, phpMyAdmin, and php itself all deal with LocalHost or the box’s IP rather than its name or the domain name, so they should be fine regardless of the changeover.

The box itself is an IBM iSeries running i5/OS with PHP via Zend Core for i5/OS. We have IBMs’s native HTTP server (based on Apache) as our front-end, and it ProxyPasses to our application server which runs in IBM’s PASE environment within the i5/OS operating system (it basically behaves like AIX).

Am I missing anything here?

I’ve never done a subdomain change, and I’m sweating it a little bit… if the sites go down, if outside links break, or if users can’t google out to the pages like they normally do, then someone is going to hide an ill-tempered gilamonster under my desk, and laugh mockingly as I writhe around in pain when it savages my toes. I honestly, I have gorgeous toes. Toes that should be preserved .

Little help?

Thanks

From your question, is the existing subdomain all set up and running and all you want to do is change the name of the subdomain?…

example.example.com to example2.example.com?

If this is the case then you may get away with simply updating the servers httpd.conf file to reflect the name that is beign pointed to the htdocs folder.

As you mentioned php mysql ect do not rely on specific host locations, they simply refer to the box and it’s localhost or ip address. Also what control panel if any do you have access to on the server?

Hi, I’m new to this domain stuff and I would really appreciate some helpI wish to purchase 2 domains I put my eye on, both com. One of them is word-word.com and the other is wordword.com and both have personal sites on them, nothing to big thou to my eyes.How can I evaluate the domains’ worth? So I can offer the domain’s owners an offer for it (I know I don’t have may chances here, but I really want to get one of these domains) How should I approach them?

The one without the hyphen is more valuable, unless you are primarily interested in SEO. The first mistake that you made was to reveal the domain names on this forum. Posts here are searchable by the engines and the domain owners may be able to discover from this fact that you are interested in their domain. This is not a biggie if you act quickly before the post shows up in search results.

Decide on your budget and send an email to the owner with an offer that is around 1/2 to 3/4 of what you are really willing to pay. You can find the owners’ info by going to domaintools.com/darkangel.com (without and with the hyphen).

Keep in mind that this person may not want to sell. Don’t get too infatuated with a “brandable” domain like this that is in use, and keep other options open.

Just wondering how to effectively sell your domains? Do you just post them on sites or have a list of contacts in higher places?Also do you think the leap from free appraisal is useless in determining value? Anyone use it?

1. List the domains for sale on domain marketplaces.

You can sign up at Sedo.com and Afternic.com in order to list your domains for sale on their site. People can then find your domains and submit offers through their system.

2. List the domains for sale on domain forums.

DNForum.com, DomainState.com, NamePros.com

3. Press Releases

Release a press statement including your domains and stating that they are for sale. If the domains are good some buyers might get in touch with you.

4. Contact potential buyers directly

This is the best way for selling high-priced domains, in my experience. However, this requires that you do some research to find buyers and you should have some contacts in the industry.

5. Domain brokers

You can contract a domain broker to actively promote your domains. Most brokers only sell better-quality domains though, because brokering domains is a business that costs the broker both time and money.

6. Park the domains and put a “for sale” link on the parking pages

7. List a “This domain might be for sale” note in the domains’ whois information

8. Buy advertising spaces to promote your domains for sale

9. Be creative. There are many ways to sell domains.

Regarding those free domain appraisal services, I wouldn’t use them.

Ok,I’m asking this question for all the noobies out there including myself. I got into domaining about a month ago and have been slowing accumulating my portfolio of domains. So far, I got one lucky domain that has 1500+ typeins per month. I say I’m lucky cause I haven’t hit that type of traffic for the rest of my domains…and I’ve been buying quite alot. In the last month, I now have around 1000+ domains.

My question is, how come so many weird domains are being sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. I see the list of dnjournal of names like

hotproperty.com $120,000
18-wheeler.com $82,390
ultimateguitar.com $101,676
wifelover.com $100,930

and I say to myself, I’ve got names like that… so what is seperating these domains to get so high a value? Is there one common denominator that one should look in order to say that, “Yes, this domain is worth at least 100K”.

I had thought that alot had to do with the Overture search results…but I was confused in a recent purchase that I made that had 2 MIL Overture search result. I thought I had hit paydirt because if 2,000,000 people use this search result every month on Yahoo alone, then my domain would be worth at least 100,000. But it turns out that it is only worth around $3000.

So what am I and all the rest of the noobies out there missing? How come we can’t get any of these 100K deals?

That’s just the way domaining goes, it’s hard to figure out every sale. All you need is ONE buyer willing to pay five or six figures for your name. It can happen if you have just the right name. That’s what makes domaining so interesting, it isn’t an exact science all the time.

hotproperty would make a good real estate site
wifelover would suit a romance or adult site
18-wheeler is a common term for a truck, though you would think the dash would hurt it.

I remember a domain ‘partnercash.com’ sold for 100k, and you wonder why. Turns out the buyer was an existing website called ‘partnercash.de’ and they just wanted the .com

If you’re in domaining get used to seeing what look like so-so names sell for high prices sometimes.

I know a guy personally who sold a horrible name for 6 figures. He is not the brightest person, by any means. He simply got lucky. Sometimes, those sales are nothing but the result of luck. Some ignorant person with far more money than they can spend decides, “Hey, I want that name. I like it. It is not great, but I like it” and they will pay top dollar for it. Keeping in mind that top dollar to us is nothing to them. To a 7 figure income, paying 6 figures for a name does not bother them.

I’d say trust your instincts when it comes to such names. It would be nice to believe that it is just end-users finding what they need. The most likely explanation is that some people are speculating under irrational exuberance.

The domain revolution is still going on, it’s just happening quietly over in other parts of the world.

It seems to me that all the good names have already been taken, and all the good aftermarket names are taken by established players.

So is it totally worthless coming into domaining now?

I don’t hope to make huge bucks. I just hope to do this thing on the side, not like the big players (dn forum has a lot of those). Heck, I’d be happy with just 500 bucks a month (being a college student, even that much is great).

But it seems that I’m already too late in the game. I’ve spent a decent amount on domains already (which I don’t think are that bad), but don’t seem to be recouping any of it.

Is it hopeless?

Every point is an answer from other domainers:

I have been looking at some misspelled domains today. I’ve also been using OVT to analyze my selections.When I type my misspelled keyword into overture, the correct spelling of the keyword comes up in the report. Now I’m thinking this is a good thing. Am I right in that assumption? For example: If I type in “spirituel”…..but the word “spiritual” comes up in the report.

Well good in the sense that overture thought your spelling was close but bad as you have no idea on volume of the misspelling. One trick is to use Vurr.com (based on AOL search data) to estimate the volume using the following formula:

Est. Ovt typo = (Vurr typo / Vurr correct) x Ovt correct

Hi just wondering what you veterans would do if you only had $4000 to start investing in domains and you were starting from scratch?

I’d probably look at buying 5 LLL.nets – at $4k (hence $800 each), you could probably get some bargains IMHO, which could then be resold quickly for more than $800 each.

You said you are just starting? I wouldn’t buy anything if I were you – just yet. You will probably lose your money. Do not spend your money until you learn enough about this industry, pricing, investment opportunities. Spend a few months to digest how the domain market works and then spend your money in confidence. Right now you are just relying on others to tell you how to spend your money, and as you see, each of them had something different to say. Who to listen to? That is something you should be able to decide before spending your money.

 Do you think generic .mobi and typos are worth investing in?

I would not suggest typos, considering people on mobile phones (the ones that would use .mobi) use a different keypad (thus, different typos) and generally type slower with more accuracy on their mobile (when inputting Web addresses, anyway).

Certain generics could very well pay off. Just a risk you’ll have to decide whether you are willing to take. Could potentially have a large pay out.

I have several .mobi names that I have parked right now. Is the market coming around to them or will it take a couple of years?I have only seen the premium names (fun.mobi and flowers.mobi) go for premium dollars, but is second and third tier kind of domain names picking up yet?

.mobi is and will continue to become more and more valuable (in my opinion). Although, some
speculate with the release of the iPhone that .mobi is unnecessary, as all cell phone carries are going to strive to include non “watered-down” versions of the internet to compete with iPhone. In which case, the .mobi extension becomes a bit antiquated. I think they should have launched it a few years earlier. However, since not everyone can afford an iPhone or phone with the “real internet” browser, I believe .mobi will continue to get larger. Perhaps plateauing when this new internet on phones is much cheaper.