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Summer Doldrums

Elliot Silver
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3

Lately, domain sellers always seem to be asking each other if others are experiencing a slow down. I haven’t had a bad year, especially considering last year was my worst year by far, but this summer has been pretty slow in terms of domain sale.

From my perspective, it seems that many domain investors aren’t investing as much as they have previously invested in the aftermarket. A number of my clients are in more of a hold mode right now, presumably waiting out this economic storm. This has caused a slow down in my business, and as a result, I am buying less after market domain names. It’s a trickle down effect.

End user companies are still buying domain names as their needs necessitate. Because these needs are demand-based, it is more difficult to close domain sales. It also seems that deals that do close are taking much more time to complete, likely a result of tighter spending.

Because many companies need to spend their entire marketing budget before year-end in order to justify the same (or an increased budget) for the following year, we may see an increase in activity in a month or two. That may be wishful thinking 🙂

In the meantime, I am continuing to build out the websites that I have and continue to market those sites that are operational. Bahamas.co is nearly ready to launch, and I am excited about these prospects.

What have you been seeing in the domain sales market lately?

QuinStreet Paid $35.6 Million for Insurance.com

Elliot Silver
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15

QuinStreet announces purchase price of $35.6 million for Insurance.com in earnings call

A couple of weeks ago, Andrew Allemann reported that QuinStreet was the buyer of Insurance.com, although the price was not revealed at the time of the news release.   In today’s Second Quarter earnings call with analysts and investors, the company reported that it paid $35,600,000 for Insurance.com. Although this includes the content, I believe the domain name was the primary asset that was acquired, and the content is good for search engine rankings.

A replay of today’s conference call will be available at 8pm EST until August 16, 2010. You can access the recording by calling (800) 406-7325 in the US and Canada, or by calling 1-303-590-3030 elsewhere in the world.   Use passcode 4328774 to access the call. In October of 2009, QuinStreet paid $16 million for Insure.com.

When I worked in one of the direct marketing groups at AIG, our group had millions of dollars to invest, and I recommended that we look into Insurance.com.   My thought was we could offer the insurance products we had access to (accident and health insurance products) while “selling” the other leads to other divisions for products we didn’t have (such as auto insurance).

Ultimately, an investment was made in other infrastructure and the Insurance.com acquisition was never really explored. My group was small-ish for AIG (9 figures in annual revenue), and it hadn’t really used the Internet for sales when I was there, so it would have been a considerable risk.

Do Real Estate Agents Get It?

Elliot Silver
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72

As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve had some good success selling geographic (city/town .com) domain names lately. In many cases, I emailed real estate agents in the area offering to sell the city or town .com domain name to them rather than to domain investors, and the response rate was horrible. In fact, I only received a couple replies in total.

Based on this, I have to ask if real estate agents get it when it comes to generic geographic domain names. The one reply that actually gave me a bit of insight was, “the domain name is too broad” which makes some sense, but considering that I hadn’t even mentioned the price, it doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me. If the name was cheap, why not take the broad domain name and use it for more narrow purposes?

In some cases, I’ve noticed real estate agents own some great city or town .com names, but even some of those people don’t seem to “get it.” Case in point, a Realtor who owns a bunch of town .com domain names wasn’t interested in buying one of my domain names in his area (he was the second reply with just a “no thanks”). This was a town that is listed on his website as an area he services, and he has listings in that area. When he replied that he wasn’t interested in buying, I figured he might want to sell some of his names, so I asked if he’d sell his names, and he said no to that as well.

If the guy doesn’t think the names are valuable enough to buy more of them (he didn’t even ask the price of my name), why wouldn’t he be open to offers to sell these assets that aren’t valuable enough to buy? It just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

I know people either use direct navigation or search engines to research the cities and towns in which they are considering a move. A Realtor could use a .com geodomain name to supply information on real estate and town information, and it would probably rank high in the search engines for the search term. IMO, this would be good for lead generation, and it would certainly be easy to remember on a business card or yard sign.

This leads me to the question asked in the title of this post – do real estate agents get it when it comes to domain names?

What has your experience been?

Swift Rank Investing in Hotel & Travel Domain Names

Elliot Silver
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31

As many people probably did after learning that Rick Schwartz sold SydneyHotels.com for $100k, I spent some time searching for city Hotels.com domain names to see who owns them and how many are developed. Just about all of the domain names I looked up are developed, which says to me that there is money in that business.

I was reading the comments on Rick’s Blog, and as is typical for Rick’s Blog, there was at least one negative comment alluding to the fact that the domain name has privacy guard and the owner’s info can’t be seen. For those of you who have any doubt about Rick’s sale, I can confirm that the buyer was in fact Swift Rank, and the company is an active domain buyer.

I’ve done some business with Swift Rank, having sold them some travel-related domain names last year. The company owns a considerable number of exact match geographical travel domain names in the car, hotel, restaurant, and travel verticals. Just about all of the company’s domain names are developed.

The company’s purchase of SydneyHotels.com probably isn’t their only   large recent acquisition. Swift Rank also owns the following great names, some of which were recent:

  • BostonHotels.com – Owned by Frank Schilling as of 6/21
  • LasVegasHotels.com
  • DelhiHotels.com
  • HongKongHotel.com
  • SaintKittsandNevisHotels.com
  • NewYorkRestaurants.com
  • SanFranciscoRestaurant.com

I would venture a guess that if you own any great City Hotels.com domain names (or other generic travel domain names), Swift Rank may be interested in discussing an acquisition.

BikeAmsterdam.com: Trade a Domain Name for a Bike

Elliot Silver
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6

In the last several months, I’ve picked up a new hobby – biking. Although it’s not easy biking around New York City (except in Central Park, which can also be a nightmare), I have enjoyed taking my bike out for long rides. As a result of this newish hobby, I’ve rented bikes on recent vacations as a way to explore a city.

After my last trip, I did a few searches for city-specific biking domain names, and I saw BikeAmsterdam.com had expired and was set to go to auction. I backordered it, and after a short three-day auction, I won the domain name. I don’t plan to develop it, but with biking being such a popular thing in Amsterdam, I think the name is valuable to any company that rents bikes or gives bike tours.

I sent out a number of emails to bike tour companies in Amsterdam last night, and I already received a couple of inquiries in response, so now it’s just about making a deal that works for both parties. I made a special offer to the bike companies who presumably have the ability to purchase bikes at their wholesale price:

BikeAmsterdam.com will either cost $3,000 USD or I will trade the domain name for a new road bike. The three choices are:

You may notice the MSRP is actually less than the $3,000 price for all three bikes. I know this, and it’s intentional. I want to see if I can trade a bike for a domain name. If anyone is interested in this opportunity, the domain name is still available until a deal is worked out.

Thoughts on the e.CO Auction

Elliot Silver
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6

I know there is an active discussion about the e.CO auction happening on Mike’s Blog and TechCrunch, but I want to share my thoughts on it because I have a unique perspective. It was reported that B52 and its CEO Lonnie Borck won the domain name for $81,000. Lonnie is one of my closest colleagues in this industry as well as a good friend outside of the business, and I was with him at the auction and after.

In my opinion, this was a very strong speculative acquisition. The .CO registry and it’s registrar partners are spending a lot of money on marketing the extension to ensure consumers know about it. .CO makes total sense for companies to use, and in fact, many companies use similar extensions in other countries – think .CO.UK and .CO.IL. I already gave some of my thoughts on .CO.

With the news that Twitter will be integrating T.CO into its system as the preferred URL shortener, and that there are many applications for the .CO Founder’s Program as well as already awarded domain names (Angel.co and Disrupt.co as examples), I think .CO is going to be big. As a one character domain name in this extension, E.CO will be worth much more than the purchase price assuming things play out like we believe they will, although Lonnie’s team acquired this domain name for a specific reason and may not be inclined to sell it.

I want to address a couple of comments made about Lonnie in the two aforementioned articles.

1) Regarding the charity being kept private: Lonnie is a fiercely private person, and he does not wish to disclose the charity recipient(s) publicly. Some people like to flaunt who they support and by how much, but that’s not Lonnie’s way to do things.

2) Regarding Lonnie’s smarts in this space: Keep in mind this public information – his company sold Scores.com for $1,200,000, owns Funding.com, Bookmarks.com, Shock.com, Winter.com, Camera.net, and Baby.net. He also owns a number of other considerable domain names that aren’t publicly known.

I think the acquisition of E.CO was a shrewd investment, and the charitable organization(s) that will benefit will certainly be very appreciative.

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