Domain Sales

Rewardville.com source code

According to the latest domain sales report put together weekly by Ron Jackson over at DNJournal, Rewardville.com was sold last week on Sedo for $4,500.

If you visit the current Rewardville.com website, it forwards to a subdomain on Zynga.com. Zynga is the company behind popular social games such as Farmville, Cityville, Frontierville, Petville, and many other games (some of which don’t have the “-ville” moniker.

Although the website is not resolving, when I visit Rewardville.com, I get an error message that says “The webpage at  http://rewards.zynga.com/ might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.” To me, that looks like the domain name is being forwarded to this Zynga subdomain, which does not appear to be resolving.

I am unsure if this is related, but there was  an article on TechCrunch at the end of November about American Express and Zynga teaming up. According to the article, “American Express is now allowing its customers to exchange their ‘membership rewards’ points for virtual goods and/or ‘game cards’ that can be redeemed for Zynga’s in-game currency.” Perhaps Rewardville.com will be used in relationship to this special partnership.

The domain name is currently privately registered, so there is no confirmation yet that Rewardville.com was actually acquired by Zynga. However, it would be strange for another entity to forward this newly acquired domain name to the Zynga website.

Thanks to David Bleaman for the tip.

The web is littered with websites that basically send out spiders to fetch content and post it on their own websites. There are also sites that repackage the RSS feed from other websites.  The objective is generally to monetize the little search traffic that comes for each post.

The owners of these sites often defend their action by saying that it can help the original site with SEO and may even send traffic to the original article if someone stumbled upon it via search engines.

It may seem like a small nuisance, but it’s actually a big deal and here’s an instance of where it may cost me A LOT of money.

A while back, I posted a few domain names for sale with the pricing. At the time, I was looking to move some names and priced them accordingly. One name didn’t sell and I still own it. I recently received an end user inquiry for the domain name, and the value is significantly greater than the price I set to sell to other domain investors.

My original post has been removed, but there are dozens of copies of it with the asking price on these aggregation websites that are supposedly helping my blog. Now I am stuck between a rock and a hard place.

I believe it’s just a matter of time before the inquirer says, “why should we pay $xxx,xxx for this domain name when you were willing to sell it for $xx,xxx so recently?” Comps of this particular name have sold for significantly more than my asking price, but it’s tough to justify such a huge price increase in a short period of time. It’s easy to say what I should tell them, but in a negotiation, it’s difficult to really justify this difference.

Sure, I could be happy selling it for that price since I would have been fine with it before. However, the situation and circumstances have changed, and it’s quite likely I will lose a significant sum as a result of aggregators indexing my original post.

(I do realize they may never be willing to pay the perceived value and may never have either. As with all negotiations, this one will be unique, but it’s tough to have this one particular facet of the negotiation in their favor.)