Daily Poll

As the calendar flipped to April, the books closed on the first quarter of 2018. For me and my businesses, it was a bit of a mixed bag. Because of some outlier deals, the overall numbers are pretty good. I had a slow February in terms of deal volume and March started pretty slow, too.

Last week was by far the busiest of the year for me. I closed a few deals and am still actively negotiating to sell a couple of other domain names to buyers who will use them well. There were no outstanding deals this past week, but it was nice to move some inventory for reasonable prices after a slow few weeks.

All in all, Q1 was good, but it could have been better. How was the first quarter for you?

I get a fair amount of inquiries to buy my domain names. The vast majority are unrealistic – ie $100 for a one word .com domain name, but they come in regularly.

Interestingly, it seems that the more qualified and reasonable offers are on my lower value domain names. Perhaps it is because there is less of a gap between a $1,500 offer and a $5,000 asking price than there is between a $5,000 offer and a $75,000 asking price. I don’t really think that is the reason though.

My guess is that a lot of people who want to buy a good one word .com are tire kickers who haven’t done much research. Everyone knows the one word .com names are great, but making a reasonable offer can be tough without market knowledge.

With a longer tail domain name, a person likely knows exactly what he or she wants and has done a bit of research to know what it should cost to buy it. I have never really done much research to investigate this theory though.

For today’s daily poll, I am curious how many inquiries and offers you receive each week.

I don’t own my first/last name .com domain name. Someone bought it several years before I was buying domain names, and he seems to happily use it. I would love to own the name, but it’s not important enough to me to buy it.

The first lesson many public people learn is to buy their domain name in the .com. For most people, their matching domain name is available to hand register. I have helped people buy and/or register their name .com, and it’s a smart thing to do if it will benefit them (ie if they’re running for office or are building their own brand). Even if there is no “need” for it at the time, it can be a good thing to own.

Do you own your first+last name .com domain name?

My company is primarily focused on buying and selling domain names. When I sell a company-owned domain name, the money goes towards my company overhead and gets plowed back into domain name investments. When it comes to company assets, my focus is on domain names.

I know of several people who operate companies that invest in a variety of things. They buy domain names, invest in physical real estate, invest in cryptocurrency, and they make other investments. When the cryptocurrency returns are through the roof, their investment capital shifts to those markets. When domain name markets are hot, they reinvest their profits into domain names.

When you sell domain names or other investments, are you putting your capital to work with domain names or other investments? Share your answer in the poll and fee free to expound in the comment section if you would like.

Several years ago, I closed a deal worth around $10,000. The deal went smoothly. A couple of months later, I had acquired two domain names I thought the buyer would want, and we agreed to a deal worth close to $30,000 (as I recall). We agreed to the deal on a Friday evening and were going to transact on Monday morning. The following Monday, the buyer let me know he had reconsidered over the weekend and backed out of the deal. It was disheartening and frustrating.

One takeaway from this experience is that I try not to close deals on Friday if they can’t be finalized before the close of business. I don’t want to get excited about a deal to have it fall through on the weekend. Having gone through a buyer backing out several times, I feel like this happens more with small business owners than larger companies. I guess I don’t have enough experience with this type of thing to say that conclusively, but that is what it seems like.

Have you ever had a buyer back out of a deal before?

We all know that parking revenue is down substantially from where it was a decade ago. There are still domain investors who make a considerable amount of money from parking their domain names. I am not one of those people, but I do make a tiny bit of incremental income from PPC revenue.

Today’s poll is meant to gauge how much of a role parking plays in the domain business in 2018. My guess is the vast majority of people who participate (myself included) will be in one of the two lowest brackets, but there are probably also a few who do exceptionally well even today.