Buying Domain Names

DomainAgents is a negotiation platform that was built to help domain buyers and domain owners come to terms on their domain name transactions. Although DomainAgents is a relatively new company, the founders have considerable domain industry experience under their belts.

The way DomainAgents  works is fairly simple, but with a unique twist. A buyer will pay a $19.95 fee to submit an offer on a domain name (more or less a fee to qualify the offer just a bit). To entice the domain owner into considering the offer, DomainAgents will pay that person $10 to review the offer, or they can choose to have the $10 donated to charity.

Phil McKegney is the CEO & Co-Founder of DomainAgents Platform Inc., the company that operates DomainAgents. A serial entrepreneur who has developed and helped launch multiple internet based companies and projects on three continents over the past 11 years. He maintains an active investment in one of Europe’s largest ccTLD domain portfolios, and recently founded a company that graduated from a Techstars affiliate startup accelerator.

ES – How does the offer and sale process work? Walk us through a transaction.

Over the years, I’ve learned there are many, many ways to make money from domain investments.

As you can probably tell simply by seeing the names I’ve sold and what I own, I personally prefer to purchase descriptive keyword domain names like DogWalker.com, Torah.com, and EventManagement.com among others. These are exact match terms for keyword searches like professions, business fields, objects…etc.

Each week in the aftermarket sales reports, I see dozens of other domain names sell for decent figures, and I can only assume most were hand registered by the seller at some point. There always seem to be sales of  brandable keyword domain names like ClearBell.com and made up terms like Vipee.com (both names sold last week via Afternic).

People can make a nice living selling brandable keyword domain names and made up terms, in addition to exact match keyword domain names. Of course, there are plenty of others, like ccTLD, gTLD, and IDN among others, but for the sake of this, let’s keep it .com.

I am curious what types of domain names you prefer for your investments. Please vote in the poll below, and feel free to discuss.

A couple weeks ago, I held an “auction” for the skyscraper banner on my blog, with the proceeds going to the Ronald McDonald House, a non-profit organization that helps children of all ages with cancer and their families.

The winning bidder was a company called WeBuyThe.com. If you aren’t familiar with the company, they acquire domain names. You can visit WeBuyThe.com  and submit domain names that you’d like to sell (along with other important information), and they will get back to you about whether or not they would be interested in buying them from you.

The skyscraper banner raised $500 for the Ronald McDonald House, and the donation will help eclipse the $5,000 mark for the year. I am still optimistic about raising $10,000 this year. Someone recently suggested I add a Paypal donation button to my blog so people can “thank” me for helping via my blog. It would mean much more to me if you can give to the Ronald McDonald House.