What’s my domain name worth?

I’m not a domainer, so please don’t consider this the final call, the only say in the business. However, i’ve been in this business a while, so this is a pretty detailed answer to the question in today’s web 2.0 society.

"What’s in a name?" as that old shakesperian question goes…

First part of the answer should be, are you selling JUST the domain or the entire site? Does the domain have a business behind it? Is that business viable? How many months has it made money, if any? Does it have a community behind it?

Size of community and affect on price. Twitter is estimated at $340 Million in value, and yet it has no advertisments and makes no cash.

Size of revenue, Ebay earns millions in commisions, yet it’s value is poised in the billions. A business like this is often sold based on a % of revenue it will earn over 3 or 5 years. That’s a negotiation starting point, not a final number.

Selling a domain by itself… 5 Factors that make a domain worth good money (possibly millions)

Direct Entry Traffic

(lots of people type www.computers.com into their address bar) In other words it has existing traffic. It’s so generic that people are going straight to the domain all the time or searching the domain’s name on Google frequently. Short: built in traffic. A person aquiring this domain only needs to figure out what their audience wants and the cash flows.

High Pagerank Domain

(Google values it) It has links from places like CNN, the federal gov’t etc… In other words, it can or does rank for top keywords on Google and is trusted by other reputable sources on the web. It’s got authority and that can have a value placed on it. This value depends strongly on several factors like the industry (big difference in price between selling gold and plastic).

Old Age

- As with good wine, a domain over 8 years old can easily be worth a ton of money especially if it has links elsewhere on the web. But regardless, age is a factor. There is a list out there if you can believe it of the oldest domains on the internet. Can you believe there were domains registered in 1985? Back then, it was FREE to register domains.. Oh yeah, I was there!

Brandable domain

(sounds like or is a good problem solver) like stopsmoking.com can have extreme value. Why? Quite simply, humans can remember it easily. A pinch of advertising and a dusting of viral conversation and a good named domain with no dashes in the name can easily get some strong traffic fast.

Ultrashort domains

Like www.what.com or computers.com. Partially because they’re so easy to remember, but also because they’re so darned hard to get. Their scarcity also gives them authority and crediblity.

Bonus: Community. . A strong community of people who like/talk/discuss the topic or name etc…
(classic examples are facebook, myspace, twitter – although they also fit ultrashort/brandable categories too)

If your domain doesn’t match these criteria, there is still some hope for it to be sold at a million dollar price tag, but not without a marketing campaign in the hundreds of thousands.

I’d love it if Randy Charach put a boot to my post and said something about how silly my stuff is. That guy knows a ton more about domain flipping than any of us can hope to learn. But, a friend asked me this question via email a few days ago, and I thought I could kill two birds with one stone by writing a post about it *and* responding to his email.

Thanks George!

Until Next Time,
Daniel J Deyette