Winemaker.com Sold for $100,000

Winemaker.com has sold for $100,000, I learned late last week. The domain name was sold by NetIncome Ventures, the domain investment firm operated by industry veteran Garry Chernoff. Uniregistry broker Tom Aughton helped close the all-cash deal.

Because of GDPR, I am unable to see who acquired the domain name. Whois records show the new registrant appears to be based in Zurich, Switzerland. The name servers are currently set to default Uniregistry name servers, so more information about the buyer is not known. The Winemaker.com landing page has a “coming soon” message within the top header.

With Installments on DAN, Pricing is Critical

When I set my prices for domain names I am looking to sell, it is more of an art than a science. There are a number of considerations I balance to set prices on my domain names. Here are some of the factors that I consider as I am setting prices:

  • Purchase price
  • Comparable sales
  • Comparable domain names for sale
  • Market conditions
  • My business conditions
  • GoDaddy appraisal on listings that will show the appraised value
  • Gut feel

After evaluating all of these factors – some more than others, I set the price for each domain name. Most of these factors are considered very rapidly, and I often defer to gut feel above all else, thinking, what can I imagine an end user paying to buy this domain name in a reasonable amount of time?

Following Up on My Observations

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A week and a half ago, I shared a bit of sales data about my business from that week. I do not really share any domain sales info or data for a number of reasons, but given the challenging times we find ourselves in, I wanted to share what I observed in my own portfolio. During that week, I closed five end user sales, which is quite a few considering that my domain portfolio has roughly 1,000 domain names in it.

With another week in the books, I want to provide a follow-up to that article to share my domain sales results and observations from last week.

All.com Acquired by Accor S.A.

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It looks like the super high value All.com domain name has changed hands. Whois records show that All.com transferred from Name.com to the corporate domain registrar CSC, and All.com is now owned by multinational hospitality company, Accor S.A. Accor owns high end popular hotel brands such as Fairmont, Raffles, Delano, SLS, Sofitel, and many others.

The acquisition of All.com was first mentioned by Jamie Zoch in a tweet this morning:

The Only Outbound Emailing I Am Doing Now

For the last couple of years, I have really cut back on my outbound marketing efforts to sell domain names. I would say that I probably target a handful of domain names a month to try and sell via outbound marketing emails, but it hasn’t been much. That being said, I have pretty much stopped doing outbound marketing to sell my domain names in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, with one exception.

The only time I have done outbound marketing in the last few weeks was after receiving an acceptable opening offer for one of my domain names. The offer was not high enough to accept right away, but I also did not want to lose the offer in the event that other buyers were not interested in making a better offer.

My Observations This Week

I maintain a relatively small domain name portfolio with approximately 1,000 domain names. Nearly all of my company’s domain names are available for sale, and I would guesstimate that somewhere between 85-90% of the domain names are considered general, nothing special, inventory. I am also regularly buying domain names in auctions and in private, although this has slowed a bit this year.

With the coronavirus seemingly slowing the domain aftermarket, I want to share a few observations of my own from the last week. I want to emphasize that my portfolio is relatively small compared to many other full-time investors, so I don’t think my observations are necessarily reflective of the general state of the aftermarket.

In the last week, I have closed 5 sales: