Disney & Marvel Make Domain Mistakes

Elliot Silver
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10

Dear Disney,

I grew up watching your movies and television shows and appreciate all you do for kids everywhere. Since you’re based in Burbank, California, I also did quite a bit of research on your company for my website, Burbank.com. However, some of your recent domain registrations are a disservice to children who will inevitably type them in incorrectly, and they will quite possibly end up seeing unrelated advertising offers at best, or pornography at worst.

Let me remind you about an incident involving typo domain names and children. Have a look at the Wikipedia page for John Zuccarini. There are people out there who will register typo domain names intentionally, and when they do, they can control what the visitor sees. Whether it’s pay per click advertising or porn, it will cost your company a fair amount of money to get those domain names back via the legal channel, when you can simply register the typos now.

I noticed that some of your new registrations contain not only one – but sometimes even two hyphens. By using these domain names, you are just asking for trouble. In addition, some of them are tough to spell and some have additional words that are more descriptive than actually necessary. For example, if you need to add “movie” to the domain name, do you really need “themovie”?   This is especially silly when both versions were available to register – and you only took one!

I know that good domain names are tough to find. However, if you settle on a long tail domain name that has hyphens, at least buy the same domain name without the hyphen – especially when it’s available to register for the same price.

Ordinarily, I would register one or more of the typo domain names to give to you at cost, but I don’t want to deal with your legal team who might think I have devious intentions. If you care about protecting children from viewing inappropriate material, and you’d like to know which domain names I am referencing, contact me.

Regards,

**

Update:

I spoke with someone in the Marvel Legal Department, and hopefully they will register the most concerning domain name ASAP.

Don’t Buy Brandable Domains Just Because a Company is Buying Similar Names

Elliot Silver
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8

I wanted to share an email I received without identifying the person who sent it or the names mentioned in the email. The reason I’d like to share it is because I know more people think like this, and I would like to offer my advice.

Elliot,

I just registered the following super-domain names: SuperXYZKeyword.com, SuperXYZKeyword.com, SuperXYZKeyword.com, SuperXYZKeyword.com, SuperXYZKeyword.com.   Do you think Supermedia/Idearc would want to buy these domain names from me? I think they are valuable.

I’ve said it many times, but I want to reiterate it. Just because one company is buying a particular type of domain names, does not mean similar domain names have any added value – especially when they are “brandable” domain names. It’s more than likely that the company went out to acquire the names they were interested in buying, and they opted to not buy others.

I personally do not believe “Super” keyword domain names have any value aside from the value added by SuperMedia when they choose to develop them. Likewise, similar brandable names bought by other companies might not have value if the company doesn’t want to buy them.

Before you go out and register names like these, you should ask yourself why the particular company didn’t think of these domain names before, when they were buying their other names. It’s likely they just weren’t interested and/or had a specific plan in mind for specific domain names.

If you do feel the “need” to take a chance and buy them, don’t buy more than just a couple. Before you know it, you will own dozens or hundreds of names with similar backgrounds, and it’s likely that you won’t sell them.

Let’s Talk About Sex (.com)

Elliot Silver
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15

Sex.com SaleI’m sure you’ve read the news that Sex.com is the subject of a foreclosure auction next month in New York City. Sex.com reportedly sold for $14 million back in 2006, but there was never any confirmation of the dollar amount for that sale and was only speculation. I am not privy to any information about Sex.com (or the sale other than what was posted), but I want to discuss some things about the domain name itself.

Without a doubt, Sex.com is one of the best pure domain names a company could own. Without it ever really being fully developed into a brand, Sex.com is one of those rare domain names that is already a brand known throughout the world.   Based on the Compete score, it gets decent traffic, and it’s a name that has the WOW factor most others don’t have. This is the name many people would love to have the chance to own if they could choose just one domain name.

There are some downsides to the name though. How does a company monetize it enough to earn a good ROI? Parking the domain name hasn’t seemed to work. Maybe that’s because people who want sex or porn can find that in plenty of other places online. The small portal that is on the site now is presumably not earning enough of a return right now either.

It’s likely the people who are visiting Sex.com don’t really want to find sex per se, but they are looking for porn. Porn is still a taboo word for many, so Sex.com is more of a “comfortable” name to own for some than Porn.com, although Porn.com certainly gets much more traffic and would probably make much more money on PPC. It’s just like a home with a pool. Some people would love to have a pool, but there are many who wouldn’t even consider a home that has a pool. Sex.com is more of a benign name than Porn.com.

According to an anonymous investor that was quoted on TechCrunch, there may be some litigation that could hold up the auction. Additionally, the amount of the debt on the loan is also unknown, and if it’s too high, the reserve price or minimum opening bid may temper bidding or cause people to not bid at all. As the auctioneer commented to me via email, “opening bid will be determined sometime prior to the auction,” and I believe this detail is the most important.

If the auction goes forth as planned, and the reserve price/opening bid is *reasonable,* I believe we are going to see strong bidding from more than one party. If the auction has participants from some of the leading adult companies outside of the domain industry, we could see a record result. In the market today, as Mike pointed out, it might be tough for a company to justify a record setting price. A name like this doesn’t come up for sale often, and this is a great opportunity that more than one company is salivating over.

Where and How Are You Selling Your Domain Names?

Elliot Silver
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15

After posting yesterday’s article discussing what names have sold recently, which was a follow up post to the post about recent domain purchases, Steve Morsa and a couple of others suggested a follow-up post. Although it’s very interesting to see what names are selling, it might be even more important to learn about where domain sellers are having luck making their sales.

For the most part, I have been selling my domain names in private to other domain investors looking. For me, the key is knowing what type of names my buyers are looking to buy and to present them with a very reasonable price. The people I sell to are contacts I’ve made over the years through my blog, at conferences, on forums, and in private. Maybe I could make more on individual domain names by targeting and finding end users, but I am comfortable with the sales I make.

I recently sold one domain name at the DomainFest Live auction run by Moniker (GunCollection.com). The sale didn’t yield as much as I had hoped, but it is what it is. I opted to not set a reserve price on the domain name, and it sold for the minimum.

Although I haven’t sold many names on domain forums, I did sell one recently on Namepros (iCookbook.com). The buyer made his first post on that forum by saying he wanted the name, which leads me to believe he had wanted this name specifically, and he signed up to buy it. His company is in that industry, so that would make sense. Maybe I priced it too low, but I sold it for a profit.

Finally, I sold a couple of names recently on my blog, although I haven’t listed many for sale here in a while. I generally try to limit my sales posts on the blog, but it’s been a good vehicle to sell domain names in the past.

I (and others) are interested in learning where you have sold some of your domain names recently, and how those sales materialized.

Tip to Buy Domains in Private: Offer an Alternative Domain Name

Elliot Silver
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2

I want to share a quick domain acquisition tip with you that I have used in the past when I bought a domain name from an end user company who was using the domain name for its website. Although I didn’t think it was likely that they would sell the name, I made an interesting suggestion to them, which helped close the deal.

My advice is that you give them suggestions for new domain names (or cheap domain names), that they can use for their website if they sell their domain name. Depending on their situation, they may be willing to take the cash and re-brand. This is more likely to happen with a company that keeps a minimal web presence, but it probably also depends on the amount of money you are willing to offer them.

Because the deal I made is private and the domain name has already been re-sold by me, I can’t use the exact names in my situation, but I will use two examples to illustrate what you might be able to do. Let’s say you are hypothetically trying to buy ChristmasTree.com from a company called “The Christmas Tree.” In your email to The Christmas Tree, you offered them $50,000 for their domain name, but they said it’s not for sale since they use it for their website.

If TheChristmasTree.com is available to register (or listed for sale), your next move might be to suggest that domain name to them as a good alternative for their website. This might be appealing, especially for a company that doesn’t heavily rely on their website, as they can get some liquidity at the expense of a URL change.

This won’t work every time, and the success rate may be pretty low. I did it once, and the offer was enticing enough to the company. It should also be noted that they didn’t use the domain name for email, so that big complication was avoided. It’s just another tool to have in your arsenal when buying domain names in private.

iCharge Should Buy iCharge.com

Elliot Silver
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18

TechCrunch ran an article today about a European company called iCharge which accepts credit card payments through an attachable smartphone accessory. The article compared it to Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s company, Square, which I previously wrote about.

I am not going to analyze the company’s product or services since that isn’t my forte and I haven’t tried it out, but I would suggest they buy an important domain name for this international company. At the moment, iCharge uses iCharge.net for its Internet presence. This might not be a problem with for some companies, but inevitably, people will type in iCharge.com, which happens to be for sale via Sedo for $10,000 EUR (not an affiliate link).

When publishers such as TechCrunch refer to the company as iCharge, people will generally assume the will be found on the .com. This is especially true for multi-national companies that operate in many different markets. As a company that will rely on trust since it’s dealing with payment processing, iCharge should not give another company the opportunity to swoop in and buy iCharge.com. If that happens, they will have no control over that generic domain name.

In my opinion, the price for iCharge.com is fair, especially considering the .net company is positioning itself to become a big player in the field. Now would be the best time to buy the domain name, before the company increases its value.

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