I had a chance to speak with David and Michael Castello last week about our industry, and we spoke at length about current trends, projections and their three year development plan for CCIN’s portfolio. This got us talking about some of their other names they haven’t developed. David mentioned that CCIN never bought a domain name they didn’t intend to develop, and I pressed them about when they thought they would develop ALL of their domain names.
After much back and forth (and some teasing about how David would be 105 before they’d be able to develop everything) I convinced them that it might be a good idea to sell some of their great names they wouldn’t have time to develop in the foreseeable future. They could put a few on the market, allowing a developer to buy them for a good price and build out a name. David especially liked the idea because he has seen many people turning to developing less quality domain names because they couldn’t buy better .com domain names.
Needless to say, I have convinced David and Michael to allow me to broker some of their domain names, and the first one I am selling for them is Caracas-Venezuela.com for $7,500. This is the exact keyword domain name of the capital city and main tourist destination for Venezuela. In comparison, Boise-Idaho.com, a much smaller market, sold for $65,000 just a couple of years ago. Caracas-Venezuela.com is 10 years old and is ripe to develop and monetize.
This is an exclusive listing on my blog, and the first person to post “sold” in the comment section will get a great domain name at an even better price.
Great news, that domain, Caracas-Venezuela.com would be great to develop. But if you developed a name with a hyphen wouldn’t you be sending traffic to the one without the hyphen?
@ Bill
On my developed website, I get over 80% of my traffic from search engines and referrals, so I would imagine the lost traffic would be minor.
Yes, there would be less type in traffic, but the domain without the hyphen would probably be a great multiple of this price.
After years and years of preaching the value of brandable generics, you are now pushing this third rate name on us, and using the whole “search engine traffic” angle as well?
jeesh. 🙂
I don’t think there is a person on this blog who would say boise-idaho.com was anything but overpriced.
Once you have the dash in there you may as well go with the .net or .org which you can get for much, much less.
Also, many counties prefer the hyphen. I would agree in the US the hyphen is less disirable.
Just my opiinion, but I would never serious development time on a name like that with a hyphen in it.
I just don’t see the “premium” in that domain. Maybe I am missing something. 🙂
@Gordon
This is much better than the crappy names I see, and outside of the US hyphenated names do very well. Have a look at Chicago-Illinois.com and Boston.Massachusetts.com – both names owned and developed by Boulevards.
Michael and I have been in this business since the mid 1990’s and I’d like to share some facts about dotComs with dashes (DWD). We own a lot of DWDs because they receive direct navigation from outside of the USA. We first noticed it with Reno-Nevada.com, Lake-Placid.com, Park-City.com and Newport-Beach.com. It confused the daylights out of us until we realized it was all coming from the Europe and the UK. For some reason, many of them separate double word domains with a dash when they type it in.
That being said, anyone can make a profit with Caracas-Venezuela.com for 7.5K with basic development. Put up plenty of original content about Caracas with a hotel affiliate deal and you’re set. This is not rocket science and the search engines will be all over a domain like Caracas-Venezuela.com Dan Pulcrano has developed some of his Geo DWDs quite well. Check out Chicago-Illinois.com and Boston-Massachusetts.com.
Michael and I don’t need to sell these names, but we know we can’t get to them in the next thirty-six months. We know first hand what they are capable of and would rather see them monetized by someone else.
By the way, the record for a Geo DWD is $800,000 for Key-West.com.
Thanks for the insight David. I guess there was part of the equation I missed and you realized.
Now I need to go back and look at some of my DWDs and see where the traffic is coming from. I have always wondered why some of my DWDs keep performing year after year……maybe that is the reason.
I’d heard about that dash thing in Continental Europe, but did not realize it applied to English domains as well.
It reminds of what Latona said once about .mx domains….that many Mexicans will search English domains and put an .mx on it. Like NewYork.mx, for example. I guessing they want good content which they think will be on an English domain, but want it in Spanish, so they can understand it.
It goes to show there are a lot of angles to the domain game.
Johnny:
The English commonly use dashes in their geography and URLs. Being a writer, at one time I wanted to register Shakespeare’s birthplace in England: Stratford-Upon-Avon. Check out the site: http://www.stratford-upon-avon.co.uk
My hyphen.com’s like OrangeBeach-Alabama.com, CarsonCity-Nevada.com, PortStLucie-Florda.com, PortCharlotte-Forida.com, Captiva-Island-com all get very decent traffic that produce.
The traffic comes equally from the US as internatiaonally.
David & Michael are not the only owners of Geo hyphen names Boulevards Media has a ton.
Honestly was very surprised at search results being as solid as they were with my hyphen names.
Yes i agree as everyone does OrangeBaeach.com is a no brainer choice but as part of a larger plan there is purpose.
.de ccTLD hyphened names go for way more than non hyphened names ant that runs right through Europe,
Some notable articles:
newfoundnames.com/hyphen-domains/you-better-believe/
newfoundnames.com/hyphen-domains/hyphen-domains-sweet-surprise/
Sorry, should have been Captiva-Island-Forida.com
I think is this buyers market there are some great deals to get a better name without the (-) for around the same price. I would check the spanish version on this.
I never had luck with (-) names, some which I got 10 years ago but maybe things are changing. Keep me posted.
Thanks, Jim
Elliot and all.
First, I agree for the most part that this domain is priced too high for domainers who are pure investors and also agree that in this market its probably easier to find better deals.
However with that said David is spot on – for any domainer with development skills its very easy to make money back on hyphen names and that is what Elliot and David are trying to say.
You can not judge all names on how they will resell to the domain community – the ultimate judge is what you plan to do with it and if development is your game (not change DNS and wait) then names like this are great and priced fair.
I wrote about the success of many hyphen names a while back –
newfoundnames.com/hyphen-domains/you-better-believe/
Now in practice I paid much more than $7,500 this for a hyphen domain 7 years ago and with a bit of good SEO and content our investment paid off many times over.
don’t knock hyphens until you know how to develop.
This is a decent domain and hyphens are good for affil marketing and full blown development.
Good investment for a domainer? no.
Good investment for a developer with special interest in travel and/or real estate in Venezuela’s capital city? YES.
$5k or even $10k for a “good” domain is peanuts… Serious webmasters will pony up, maybe not today or tomorrow but sooner than later, they will because there is only keywordkeyword.com/net/org and the keyword-keyword.com and maybe a few cctLD’s that make sense.
Five or ten options at best.
Cheers,
Mike
>>This is not rocket science and the search engines will be all over a domain like Caracas-Venezuela.com<<
Nothing inherent about the domain will give it a seo boost – no exact match, no aged links, etc.
David or Elliot,
How about the visitor numbers or revenue. That will summerize the influence of the hypen on direct navigation.
To those people who had issues with the hyphen, how about Hotel-Reservation.com, which just sold for $208,000
http://domainnamewire.com/2009/09/14/hotel-reservation-com-domain-checks-in-for-over-200k/