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TheDomains.com & ElliotsBlog.com Separated by 7 Websites in Alexa

Elliot Silver
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I generally don’t pay much attention to Alexa rankings. I write articles of interest based on what I am doing and what I see in the domain industry, and I figure people will visit if they want. I know Alexa tends to be skewed towards Internet and tech focused websites, so as much as some people use it as a means of gauging traffic, I don’t pay much attention to it.

Yesterday evening I checked out the Alexa ranking for my website and was pretty surprised to see it below 25,000. I’ve seen an uptick in traffic, but the last time I checked it was in the 30s. I wanted to check a few other domain blogs that I read to see if they’re also seeing a “better” Alexa ranking, and I was very surprised when I checked the Alexa ranking of Mike Berkens’ Blog.

Out of millions of websites tracked by Alexa, Mike’s blog (23,128) and my blog (23,121) were separated by a grand total of 7 websites. I cross checked the Compete score, and we are separated by around 200 websites. This seems pretty minuscule in the whole scheme of things, and it’s always fun to be in the good company of Mike (and Judi).

Saturday Afternoon Updates

Elliot Silver
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Here are a few updates on this nice Saturday afternoon.

  • I was a bit surprised to see Dating.com sell for $1,750,000 because I thought I saw that the reserve price was much higher. I was wrong, and it’s good to see this sale. I am looking forward to learning who the buyer was. I have a couple of guesses but will keep them to myself. Congrats to Moniker/Snapnames for the big sale, which comes on the heels of their $5.5 million sale of Slots.com.
  • If you get an offer from someone over email or via marketplace, do as much due diligence as you can. The most obvious things to search for are the person’s name, company name (from email or signature), and IP address. If those yield nothing significant, search for the domain name’s term in Google, the USPTO, and see who owns other extensions. Knowing the potential buyer is a critical step in any negotiation.
  • I was looking over my financials from 2007 and 2008 to compare them to how things are stacking up this year (2009 was a bad year so I am going to forget it ever happened 🙂 ).   Although I have fewer sales this year, my revenue is better than 2007 year to date and a little less than 2008 which was my best year. Over the past couple of years, I focused on selling less names but focusing on much better names. The result is less time selling and more time to focus on other things.
  • Just a quick update on DogWalker.com.   It’s now in month 5 of existence and the site is drawing over 4,000 unique visitors monthly. This comes on the heels of reducing my ad spend on Google, Bing, and Yahoo, so it’s great to see the traffic levels remaining the same despite the costs decreasing significantly (attributed to good SERP rankings).   Right now, the site is up to 193 dog walkers, with just about all paying $49 a year on a Paypal subscription. Not too shabby for a domain name that had been unused by the previous owner for almost 12 years and only saw about 5 visits a day before launch. That’s close to $10,000 in annual revenue (even though it hasn’t been live for a full year).
  • CatSitter.com has grown much more slowly, but that could be due to the fact that I didn’t advertise it as much. Interestingly, CatSitter.com was parked for a number of years before I bought it, and I am having trouble with SEO for the site. I wouldn’t formulate an opinion based on one instance, but since both sites were built in exactly the same way at around the same time, it’s interesting to note that the non-parked domain is performing much better in SERP results despite having significantly more competition.   Both sites were built on WordPress.
  • I am looking to sell HorseStable.com.   I haven’t reached out to end user buyers for it yet, but I think it would either be useful as a directory of horse stables or an online store to sell horse stable supplies.   Let me know if it’s of interest. Also, in light of my two sales of Hong Kong domain names in the last month, I have a few more to sell. Let me know if you’d like to see the names before I put them on the market next week (the second domain still has my company listed as owner, but it’s in escrow and being transferred to Godaddy).
  • One tip to get some free traffic to your websites: post listings on various Craigslist city websites and encourage people to visit your site for relevant information. I am doing this with DogWalker.com, and it probably receives 25 visits/day from these listings.   Compared to paying Google up to $2/click, this is saving significant costs.

Local NBC News Anchor Buys Presidential Barack “Hottie” Obama Domain Name

Elliot Silver
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You’ve all probably heard the news from Buffalo, New York by now. President Barack Obama visited a famous wing joint in Buffalo yesterday, and he was greeted by a 45 year old woman who loudly proclaimed, “you’re a hottie with a smokin’ little body!” Kinda funny, kinda inappropriate, but what the heck. You may only get to meet the president once after all.

NewYorkMag.com reported that shortly after this made the news, Buffalo news anchor Scott Levin (from NBC affiliate WGRZ) thought he could cash in on this news event and decided to buy HottieWithASmokinLittleBody.com in the hopes that someone would be interested in buying it from him.

It’s pretty interesting to see a local news anchor registering domain names related to a   news event in the hopes of cashing in on it. If Levin really thinks someone would want to buy it, he shouldn’t leave the standard Godaddy parking page up. It’s also interesting to see people who aren’t in this business buying domain names with the hopes of flipping them for easy cash.

UFC KO’s Owner of TheUltimateFighter.com Domain Name by Filing Lawsuit

Elliot Silver
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According to Sherdog.com, a website devoted the UFC and Mixed Martial Arts news, results, and fighting, the parent company of the UFC and WEC went to court to take over the domain name, TheUltimateFighter.com. Zuffa, LLC claims the registrant did not have the rights to use their “Ultimate Fighter” trademarks, a number of which are registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

The domain name is currently listed for sale at Sedo, and according to the listing, it has received three offers. The UFC and Spike TV currently use a similar domain name, UltimateFighter.com to promote their Ultimate Fighter programming, which is known as The Ultimate Fighter.

Sherdog reported that the domain owner does not plan to dispute the lawsuit and intends to give the domain name to Zuffa, LLC. In my opinion, this is the smart move. The owner could have spent anywhere from several hundred to several thousand dollars (and quite possibly more) to defend his ownership rights, and the results are certainly not guaranteed. Even if he would prevail, I don’t know if that particular domain would be worth the price of defending it.   Certainly that would depend on the legal fees that would be incurred.

As Kenny Rogers once sung, “you’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, know when to run.”

Thanks to Dan Cera for the tip.

Sun Sentinal Uses Rick Schwartz for DomainFest Publicity

Elliot Silver
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A friend of mine emailed me a Sun Sentinal article about today’s DomainFest one day power networking event, and the irony is that Rick Schwartz took center stage (Rick is the founder and principal of the competing Traffic conference). The article cites Rick’s sales of Candy.com ($3m) and iReport.com ($750k) and it discusses the DomainFest conference and upcoming auction that takes place this afternoon.

The article offers some good coverage of the domain industry, and it interviews Oversee.net CEO Jeff Kupietzky, DNJournal Publisher Ron Jackson, and “Domain King,” Rick Schwartz. Rick was very complementary about the Snapnames/Moniker auction, saying there is “a nice list of domains for grabs.”

After reviewing the domain names in the auction and hearing that Slots.com was sold for $5,500,000 this week at Snapnames (as reported by Rob Monster), I wouldn’t be surprised to see one or two big deals completed during the auction or shortly thereafter. It’s clear that Moniker is working the phones in an effort to complete some large sales.

EverythingEverywhere.com Reportedly Sold for 1,900 GBP ($2,806 US Dollars)

Elliot Silver
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According to Sedo’s weekly domain sales report, the domain name EverythingEverywhere.com was reportedly sold to the new T-Mobile and Orange entity for 1,900 GBP, or roughly $2,806 US dollars.   As discussed here and elsewhere yesterday, some people thought the owner either left a lot of money on the table or was hosed by Sedo for some reason.

After seeing the sales price for the domain name, I think the owner got more than a fair price for it.   I don’t think many people would have valued it on its name merits only at more than the price that was paid. Of course the company that bought it may have had to pay more if necessary, but I think close to $3,000 US Dollars is damn good for a domain name like this.

Interestingly enough, the company also purchased EverythingEverywhere.net from Buy Domains for $788 back in March. Perhaps if the owner had looked at the other domain registration, he would have known to ask for more, although the registration appears to be private and doesn’t show as being registered to the actual company.

Incidentally, The Register news article mentioned that the domain sale was completed the day the news broke, so perhaps the company was waiting to finalize the sale prior to making the announcement. If that’s the case, it was a very smart move that probably saved them quite a sum of money, considering the fact that the former owner thought the 1,900 GBP price was “nominal.”

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