Uncertain Times Still Bring Opportunities for The Million-Dollar Domain Industry

Million Dollar Domains – EP12

[00:00:00] Craniums are still in a very precarious position. We try to get them to cite that. And then yesterday we opened testimony in class by testimony standards. We don’t know, but I think it should be a reminder that we are still in the very early stage. Welcome everybody. We’re starting million dollar domains.

About one minute late today throughout his modern history has proven quite good at absorbing law. And moving forward is a KGB thug who thinks human life is cheap. I get my, uh, off here

million dollar domains. I always feel like I’m channeling lifestyles of the rich and famous. When I talked about million dollar domain names. [00:01:00] When I invited a few more people in,

well, it’s been another busy week in million dollar domains companies upgrading to one word.com domains.

I think, uh,

embrace.com, which is Elliot site. He’s tried to highlight, uh, a lot of the, uh, the recent updates. Um, Jamie’s doc on his blog has done a great job. So we’ll talk about some of those today and, you know, there’s no doubt that the world turmoil [00:02:00] has probably gonna affect the million dollar domain buying and domain selling.

And at the same time, my general thought and I’ll lead with this is that I don’t think. Domain names, million dollar domain names have got the liquid benefits of running up like a lot of stock market and other assets to be as much at risk when we have a, you know, some turmoil. And I think that the big move of companies to upgrade to one word.com domain names is a multi-year move.

And I think you’ll still keep, you’ll still keep happening. So I’m still saying volume of companies moving to million dollar domain names, if the [00:03:00] world turmoil and the inflation and gas prices. And, um, you know, there’s kind of a closet bear market in stocks. You may think your 401k is down 20%, but there’s a chance more than 60% of smaller technology stocks are down more than 50% cryptos down.

A lot of stuff is down. There’s no easy way to make money right now. And I think in million dollar domains, you’re not going to get, um,

You know, you’re going to have to make a long-term decision and maybe you’ll get a little bit better price over the next six months. Uh, then times when people were just saying this was my price, take it or leave it anyway. Uh, Andrew Allaman does a great job, um, that domain name wire. And if you don’t, uh, tag domain name wire and follow him on Twitter and follow his [00:04:00] blog, the reason I follow his blog is I get an email every time he posts a new story.

And, um, Andrew does a neat thing where he looks at the sales results as they do comes in and they report their top sales this week. And then he tries to see if there’s a little backstory. Um, so he talks about be. Let the list for $68,000 last week that was sold unsafe. And even though it doesn’t resolve and you can tell, um, who bought it?

I think big capital is a perfect example. In my opinion of what’s happened in the last two years, then high value domain names. That’d be capital is not a million dollar domain name. It’s only 68,000 when you compare it to a million dollars, but that’s a lot of money for a two-word dot [00:05:00] com domain name.

But I think it shows. Again, whenever there’s a transaction, that means a willing buyer paid a willing seller, that price for this domain name. And even though you can’t go value all your domain names, if you have, instead of B capital, if you have buzzed capital, or if you have ant capital, or if you have alligator capital, you can’t necessarily say that your name is all of a sudden worth $50,000.

But what it does show I believe is that when a buyer, once, when the exact name and the seller holds out for a super high price, many buyers are going to pay it because the benefits that they’re going to get from owning this domain name over its lifetime.[00:06:00] 

Are going to be greater than the money that it has to pay now to buy the domain name. This is what we talked about last week, the basic equation for a smart buyer. Now, if you’re trying to sell your name to a deep discount buyer, this isn’t going to work. If you’re trying to sell your name to someone who thinks they should get a million dollar name for $5,000, this isn’t going to work.

But as we talked about last week and you can listen to the word recording, excuse me, the equation for the buyer is. Are the benefits of buying this domain name worth more than the money I have to spend to buy it. And the one thing that’s going in Staver of domain names and high value domains right now is that there’s a chance that the, that the one side of the equation, the money you spend to buy a [00:07:00] premium top tier ultimate pre-me, you know, whatever we’re going to call a million dollar domain name.

There’s a chance that if inflation continues that that money itself is going to be worth 7% less a year. And after five years that cash left uninvested not put to work. It’s only going to be worth 65% of what it’s worth today, if the inflation continued. But as I’ve shared with everybody, one of the reasons that I think million domain names are a special asset.

And I think when you apply it to million dollar domain names, you apply it to the scale of money. That makes sense for big companies and medium-sized companies.

Is that the value of your domain name? When it’s applied to your business and your business is increasing [00:08:00] prices to match inflation over the value of the domain name. If it provides a 10% enhancement to what you’re doing now, or a 20% enhancement, it’s going to be applying its value, its power. It’s a prestige to higher and higher and higher amounts of money.

So if you think of the equation for someone right now from million dollar domain name, they’re spending cash that may be declining in value F left on invested. They’re in a market where the easy money isn’t being made in crypto and NFTs like it was maybe last year. And the thing that they’re buying the premium domain name.

It’s going to be incrementally more valuable as the years go on because the domain names, power and prestige are going to be applied to the current [00:09:00] value of your income each year, which rises with inflation of the current value of your valuation of your mind. And so I think that this was this so summed up best in a book, probably the best book ever done on Warren buffet of how he made money during the seventies and eighties, when we had inflation.

And how did he navigate through it and have his hedge fund slash company go up with annual rate of returns of over a hundred percent a year. And when she went back through this one, author went back through and looked at it. She was able to determine that because he invested in brands like CS camp. The Washington post Coca-Cola and that those brands kept their value during inflationary times, because if see’s [00:10:00] candies able to sell their candy for 30% more because of their company’s reputation and prices of candy slowly go up with inflation, then they’re going to be able to sell at a 20 to 30% higher price as the prices go up.

So when I think about domain names, I think that the same thing, I think the intrinsic value of a domain name is isn’t going to enhance the value of a company. It’s not going to necessarily make a company, although it could for a lot of startups. So I think if you’re, if we’re in this time for the rest of the year where we’re going to have an uncertain world, The consumer may not be as strong with gas prices.

Inflation is going to factor into investment decisions. You may have a better pricing environment to buy long-term domain assets, [00:11:00] but the big moves of why companies are moving to domain assets, shouldn’t be impeded that. Because I believe companies that are spending one to $5 million now to buy the best domain name for their business.

They’re doing that because they think they’re going to get five to $20 million worth of benefits over the next 10 years. That because domain name pricing, if you have to look at the past and it’s so uncertain, it’s such an efficient market. There’s liquidity risk. All of these things lead to the fact that people are still probably paying discounted prices to the true value of what they’re buying.

And that’s going to be there this year, whether or not we have ups and downs in the stock market, interest rates, the economy or global effects. So we’re going to keep going with million dollar domains this year, because I [00:12:00] think we’re in a multi-year move. And this bee capital that I mentioned that Andrew covered with Sadia.

I think it shows that small to medium sized businesses when presented with the chance to get the exact right name for their company. In this case B capital, even though they could have been B capital Inc, or my B capital or B dash capital or B capital.net or B capital.online real world people, companies, successful companies chose to pay the $68,000 to get the best and perfect domain name for their company.

And the reason is then I’ll go back and introduce million dollar domains and what we try to do here, the reason I believe that a name like the act itself $50,068,000, [00:13:00] is when you’re at the top of the pinnacle of the perfect domain for a company.

And you’re dealing with income, parable, other names. There’s no easy way to determine how much better the best name is then the second best name, except that for that company. There’s something to be said for them having the perfect best name for their company, if their company’s called beat capital and to come off that and have to admit that they’re second best, or they couldn’t get the perfect name and then apply that equation over the next 10 years.

Then you look@sixtyeightthousanddollarsthattheypaidtobebcapital.com and that’s $6,800 a year or that’s $500 a month. So think about [00:14:00] it in a world where most companies are operating digitally or virtually. In this case, B capital is paying $500 per month of allocated cost to have the perfect and best.com domain name for their company.

And if you think of the fact that companies are probably not spending what they used to spend for office space and other facilities based assets that were the backbone of what companies spent their money on, all of a sudden that $68,000 for B capital, when you lead, when you look at it in the future, doesn’t look so crazy.

Now people might say, I don’t want to pay that. And when you’re selling a domain name or you’re buying a domain name, you’re going to try to get it for the best price you can. And you’d love if you were the owner of B capital two, [00:15:00] about that name for 4,000, because a different seller had it and would sell it for that.

But it just shows that we have, in my opinion, a huge amount of undiscovered upside in domain names. And I think that applies to million dollar domain names as well. Hey Sam, thanks for joining us today from the UK. Do you ever feel when you’re talking about one of your premium names to the client, that even though the money seems like it’s a lot, when you start talking about it, in terms of the years, they’re going to get benefits, you almost kind of want to say, are you really a successful big company or not.

Yeah, all the time, all the time, because we think about what companies spend on leases, what companies spend on professional services and consultants [00:16:00] and studies, and, uh, you know, right now, one of the biggest expenses companies have is recruiting, you know, trying to get people and then what they spend on cars and transportation and conferences and travel, you know, and none of that is really that those are all going to be minor expenses that contribute to the whole company.

And then we feel like a good domain name is going to be something that resonates throughout the whole. So I’m a Homer for domain names. My name’s page, how I’d do the show million dollar domains every week. We’re part of domain clubs, the largest club on clubhouse for domain names. We’ll do this show today in front of a live audience.

And I want to thank everybody for joining. We got a good crew today. Please come on up on stage. I’d like to get your opinions about some of the things we’re talking about. If you’re selling a million dollar domain name, or if you just bought a million dollar domain name, or you kind of want to give me a, what do you think?

[00:17:00] Um, come up on stage. Second thing I’ll do is I’ll turn on the chat. This is a new feature for the live audience. During the show, you can talk about what I’m saying or introduce other things in the chat, and everybody can see. Now I want to emphasize this has million dollar domain names. So this is whether we say 500,000 and above because you want to sell it for a million.

This is not the time to say I have, uh, some dumb name dot dumb TLD. Please contact me to buy it. Um, I’m not gonna go through the chat and bounce people out, but, uh, but this is for a million dollar domain names. This is a different, this is a different show. And so if you want to comment on what I’m doing, if you want to present a question, uh, that you don’t want to comp on stage to do, we are recording this.

Um, so we have the live audience and then we have a lot of people that are going to listen to replays. [00:18:00] And then we also on clubhouse. Now people can listen to this show as a podcast, so welcome to million dollar domain. Uh, my name is paids, how I’ve invested domain names for the last 22 years. Uh, I probably bought and sold over 10,000 domain names for almost $10 million.

And I’ve sold $2 million domain names, um, uh, back in 2007. And I started this room a couple of years ago, cause I felt like actually a year ago, but I started this concept of million dollar domain names for my domain conference. And the idea that it’s a different discipline. You may have preconceived notions about domain names and what they’re worth based upon the fact that you can buy them for $8, but you gotta remember there’s 150 million.com domain names out there.

So if you’re trying to compare some something that’s in the bottom half of the 150 million domain names that are literally bought [00:19:00] and sold each year, people are buying about half the domain names that get bought every day are going to expire after a year. And that’s a lot different than when you start talking about the top 30 or $40,000 domain names.

That’s, I’m sorry, the top 30 or 40,000 domain names where you’re talking about the 1% of the 1% and in any asset where there’s 150 million of something, and you’re talking about names that might rank in the top thousand, the top 10,000, the top 20,000, the top 30,000, it’s going to be a different discussion because the other thing that’s that that makes domain names and their valuation, I believe completely different than anything else is that you’re not talking about 150 million of the same thing.

You’re not talking about 150 million pairs of Levi jeans. You’re not talking about 150 million big mats. [00:20:00] You’re not talking about a 150 million cars. You’re talking about 150 million things. And the top 1% of the top 1% are all unique and irreplaceable. To the extent that once I owned money.com, no one else can own money.com.

Now they can own finance.com or they can own stocks.com or they can own bonds.com. But each domain name is singularly unique and they can only be owned by one person. So when we talked about million dollar domains, that’s kind of the area that we’re talking. And I really have three audiences out there.

If you own a million dollar domain name, you’re in charge of managing it, you may not be sure what you have. You don’t know if your name is worth a million dollars or you’re managing it for your company. You probably want to manage that a little bit differently than someone who’s managing a portfolio and ordinary group of names.

You should have two [00:21:00] factor security on the registrar account that you own that name going beyond that you can go with registrars and have that name owned in an account. We’re literally that domain name cannot be transferred out of the account. Unless someone calls you and you give approval, you’re probably more likely to take a name.

That’s a million dollar domain name and renew it for 10 years in the future. That’s the maximum time that you can renew it. Them. Each year you may want to, when it has nine years left pay for the 10th year. Now there’s a little bit of risk to doing this and that a domain name, much like an NFT or a blockchain asset is purely managed by the email address of two different sources.

One, the email address for the [00:22:00] account that owns the domain name can log into the account at a registrar like GoDaddy or Namecheap and they can make changes to that name. So the email address of the account owner, that that name is in is critically important. And if you’re in a company, I believe you want to make sure it’s clear that whoever is managing that account, that it’s.

That they’re managing that account for the benefit of the company. In other words, the five worked for my company’s called Joe domains and, and say, I was just an employee at Joe domains. I might have the email addressPage@joedomains.com. And that may be the email address that controls a registrar account, but you’re going to want to make it clear in the way you list your ownership of that name, the agreement that you have with that employee, that [00:23:00] they do not own that name, even though they own the email address that logs in.

It’s kind of like if you give your employee the, um, key to a safety deposit box or a PO box, will you give the company the key to the PO box? You give the employee the key to the PO box so they can go get the mail each day, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they own that. There’s a $10,000 check that comes in.

They can’t just take the 10, say there’s $10,000 of cash that comes in. They can’t just take it. So you want to just think about that? Because a lot of companies that started out, they might put their domain name and the name of their technology consultant and say, Hey, can you just get that domain for me?

And then do it. And over time, some of the technology consultants tried to kind of mooch in there and try to say, well, no, I own that domain name. Or I bought that domain name because they control it. [00:24:00] So if you own a high value domain name, I would encourage you. If you’re a domain investor to put your hundred thousand dollars above domain names in a separate account, maybe in a separate registrar, Maybe renew them out for future years, maybe put the highest level of security protection you can have on them.

Then the last thing you want to do is you probably want to use maybe a monitoring service. And I know domain IQ has this and domain tools has this. And literally you can put in your domain name or even your email address, and they’ll email you each day, if any changes have been made to that domain names, internet record.

And, and, and that could be important because you may not find out if someone was really savvy and really good at being able to, to get your domain name, to fake the registrar out, um, to call in [00:25:00] and convince them that they had the password. You may not always find out if your name’s gone. You think you should.

But you may not. So anyway, that’s managing million dollar domain names. Second audience is people that buy and sell million dollar domain names. You may be trying to buy domain names for 50,000 and selling for a million. You may be trying to take a million dollars of capital, put it into two or three names and grow it.

You may be a hobbyist. You may be a collector. You may be a broker. You may have said that if you’ve got the brokerage skills to sell domain names, why not do it on the highest names you can find? And the best way to learn about million dollar domain names and the way to learn about this market. In my opinion, it’s to find somebody with the high value name and pitch them and letting you go sell it.

Cause you’re going to talk to real live customers. You’re going to learn [00:26:00] what they think about domain things. You’re going to learn the questions they have about domain names. If you ever do decide to invest your own money in million dollar domain names, you’re already going to have an idea of what customers want in an exchange for signing up and signing a brokerage agreement where you’re going to get paid a commission to sell that name.

You get a chance to have real life conversations with a real live domain name. So you don’t just have to ask somebody. What do you think about, you know, buying a million name, a dollar, a dollar domain name, domain name. What are you thinking about buying a domain name for $3 million? Do you think your company would ever spend two and a half million dollars?

You can have conversations with people and say, what about this specific domain name? And I think that’s probably the best way to get in to million dollar domaining unless you have. You know, a lot of money, [00:27:00] $20 million, $30 million. And then the last group we talked to here is people in the domain industry where a lot of the things that apply to million-dollar domain names, maybe the same type of trends and the same things that are happening there are happening at smaller levels throughout other TLDs, uh, managing domain portfolios or just the whole business.

It’s nice to have some million dollar stories when you’re talking to people and they say, oh, domain names aren’t worth anything. And you can say, well, just in the last month, there’s been reported sales of over $17 million of individual domain names. There’s been 20 to 30 transactions that are probably over a million dollars where they didn’t report the price.

And the overall domain market is almost a billion dollars of direct registrations. And maybe as much as that or more in resales, Kind of someone doesn’t want [00:28:00] to hear the truth. They’re going to blow off that. They’re just going to say that’s not true, but if someone’s really seriously looking at it and hearing that there’s billions of dollars of turnover every year, you know, domain names are serious business, a million dollar domain names are a serious business.

So anyway, that’s most of what I brought to everyone today. Let’s see if we have any new million dollar domains or million dollar questions going on. Let’s have anybody in the chat. We’ll see who our first chatter is today. Um, let’s see, what else happened in Andrew’s report of save you sale for the week?

We had no buy.com go for $60,000 in O B a. And this is what we call in domain. Investing a CV, CV, meaning it’s a consonant vowel, [00:29:00] consonant. And I think, you know, Hulu is probably the best example of this type of name, that in my opinion, a lot of startups were using because they were priced out of one word domain names that were in the millions of dollars.

So you used to be able to get these CVC V names and the thousands of dollars under 10,000. So now we have a company called Nova project and they’re going from Nova project.com, which they may have started with. They may have hand registered it and just bought it for the regular fee and they’ve paid $60,000.

Um, This is a nonprofit to pay this money. The Deneer education fund bought this domain for their project, um, which makes textbook like education available to the masses. And this is from Andrew element’s research on domain name wire@domainnamewire.com or [00:30:00] dnw.com. And so if someone says, well, you know, why would someone move up from Nova project.com to Nova?

This company is doing it and they’re paying $60,000 to move up from a two word.com to a CVC v.com. Another sale that happened last week was my bff.com for $25,000. Andrew was able to find out that this company teaches crypto and web three topics. Their title tagline is empowering and new aids or friends who crypto.

And so they may have thought, Hey, let’s get bff.com. And if bff.com was owned by another domain investor, maybe that was $700,000. And I think one of the first derivatives that a lot of companies go with, um, is a, my, or maybe get, or maybe [00:31:00] Hey, or maybe an I or an E at the beginning. So here’s a case where they went for my bff.com for twenty-five thousand dollars.

Let’s see, um, had an interesting name on the, the save you list. This is Andrew Allaman on domain name wire, reviewing the list of names that sold on Seydoux and say news reporting of their domain name sales is one of the valuable tools that we have in the industry, because in my opinion, it’s one of the few places where we’re seeing retail end users and what they pay for domain names.

Meaning a lot of the reports that you get about domain names, sales are wholesale investors buying expired auction inventory, um, buying an e-liquid asset that they’re going to have to hold for two to five years. And they’re probably hoping to buy that at a 70 to 90% [00:32:00] discount to its market value. And when they sell it as market value, we may not see that publicly reported, except for some of the domain investors like Braden, Paula, who do reports or domain name sales with, which helps everybody.

But say to you is one of the places that there are retail exchange. I talked about them on Monday quite a bit, and they do report their sales each week. So here we have my BFF $25,000, which gives you a really good comp if you’ve got a similar name with a text message abbreviation with a Mai or an I or a Hey in front of it.

And again, whether or not you get $25,000, that’s going to depend on the unique desires of your buyer and what you need to get out of the name. But I think, you know, keeping an eye on these comps and especially some of the backstory, it should be really valuable for most domains. The other one that [00:33:00] happened was on the list for $5,000 was parked full.com.

I think this is an interesting group of domain names. That’s gotten more popular in the past five or six years, which we call maybe a brandable and part full is kind of interesting because is it a dictionary word or is it a brandable? You have this ending full F U L. And I don’t know if people use the word part full in everyday conversation.

So I’m going to say that this is a brand. But if you think about the fact that people are used to putting full at the end of different words, to derive their meaning, and you still get some of the credibility of the main word part. So this company didn’t have to buy part.com. They got part full.com. Um, and this is a company called Samson VT.

They help companies with after sale activities, such as providing virtual product [00:34:00] manuals. So now they’ve been able to brand their business involving virtual product manuals as part full.com. And that’s a seven letter. It’s a one word to the extent that you’re not having to remember two words. And if you do have a two word name, you always have the idea that those two words could be shifted around in their order.

They could have a dash between them. There’s more and more substitutes for them, but in this case, they got parkville.com for $5,000. And I think they’re probably happy to get it. I think when they talk about their company, when they talk about their product, they’re going to say part full our products portfolio, the portfolio, a group of products does this for you.

Be part full, use our products. And when they say contact me, it’s going to be page at dot com. So, these are not always quantifiable benefits. Like maybe the domain space had 10 years ago, when you can say, well, if you own part, [00:35:00] you know, something.com that you’re going to get search engine placement because you have the word part in your name.

And I think those were more quantitative reasons to buy a domain name. And now we’re dealing with more subjective, you know, reasons to buy a domain name. But this is why I think this is important. This is one of the main things I’ll be talking about this year. I’m million dollar domain names. I think in general, company’s profit equation in today’s market is such that they’re trying to do everything they can to convince people, to pay the highest possible price many times because of how they feel.

About the company that they’re doing business with. That’s a lot different than maybe 30 years ago. When a lot of business was based upon what I’m going to call cost accounting, meaning [00:36:00] effort costs a certain amount of money to make a car. Then the company marked that up 20% and that’s how much you paid for the car.

And so another company wanted to only market up 15% they could, but really you were limited by this idea of a certain amount of profit, a certain amount of reasonable. Money that you could expect to pay over the cost to make something. And I think we’ve changed amazingly in this regard. We’re now you see startups trying to come up with products that they can charge you per month, four per year for one time charge.

But they’re trying to get you to feel like you want to do business with that company in such a way that you’ll pay X or two X or three X or five X and their profitability. We’ve seen gross margins for technology companies go from 20 to 30 to 50, to 80 to 90% because of this [00:37:00] idea of how you feel when you buy a product from that company.

So if you think about what a domain name can do for this type of company, they can contribute to this aspect of how you feel about the company you’re doing business. And if they have a short dominant, one word domain name, that’s going to contribute to the idea that you’re doing business with a strong, established, viable leader in their business.

Now it’s kind of counterintuitive because the more money, if you buy something for a company and they’re making a huge amount of profit, you’re kind of getting ripped off. That’s the way I used to think. But now as a business person, you have to say no, everything I can do to make someone perceive more value about what they’re buying from me.

I’m going to make more money year after year after year after year. So when I bought the domain name million dollar domains.com. Million dollar [00:38:00] domains.com and million dollar domains.com at the beginning of last year. It’s because I felt that if I’m going to have a consulting business where I help companies acquire million dollar names, I help companies structure their names for sale.

Um, I don’t really do as much brokering as I do trying to help people reposition their names, to get the, the, the amount of money that they want. And I do it on an hourly basis, but I felt that being million dollar domains was going to give me over the next 10 or 20 years, much more prestige and much more benefit than the $3,000 I paid for that domain name.

And if you start applying that to companies that are looking to do five and 10 and 20 and $50 million, and they’re looking at all kinds of things on the cost component of their bills, Time to save money as best they can. But they’re also [00:39:00] looking at things that will let them charge the most money that they can.

And I think buying and acquiring a premium domain name that is going to both be your address, how people find you to interact with you and potentially even buy your product where you don’t have to go through a distributor. You don’t have to go through a sales, uh, a company. You don’t have to pay anyone else to commission.

You could deliver your product direct to consumer. Then you want everything about how easy it is to do business with your company. Everything about how easy it is to remember the name of your company to be contributing to your profitability. And I think that’s what domain names do. And so if you are a company that’s going to have annual sales or turnover of 10, 20, 30, a hundred million dollars.

And you could be 1% better, 2% better, 3% better. You’re talking about applying [00:40:00] 3% to $10 million and doing that for the next 20 years. And all it costs you is money, which right now is pretty plentiful and might even be declining in value. If we get the type of inflation that we’re having in the past year and effect continues.

I think that’s a rational, reasonable case for companies to look at million dollar domain names. And the pricing that they’re going to see in the marketplace is most of the time going to be simply the imagination of the seller. Have they always wanted to sell it for a million dollars? Have they always wanted to sell it for 2 million?

That’s really what a seller is looking at is they want to know. Where should I sell a name? That’s probably the question I get the most. They’re kind of a little bit afraid that they’re going to sell it too low. They’re [00:41:00] wondering if they should hold on and maybe get more. And a lot of times sellers have million-dollar domain names.

It’s not just about the money it’s about did I do the right thing that I sell in at the right time? And a lot of times their identity can be wrapped up in that name. We’re for five or 10 or 20 years. If they bought the name back. When, when names were first registered bubble, they’ve always thought, well, I’m going to be worth $20 million because of this domain name that I have one of your worst 5 million or 10 million.

And in different times, and 2000, they may have thought they were 30 million. 2003 or 2002, they’re going to worth 2 million, 2007. They’re up to 10 million on a great domain name. 2008 are down to 2 million. Again, 2014, maybe they’ve come up to 3 million, [00:42:00] 2019. There’s still a 3 million, 2020. All of a sudden they can get five.

And boy, when you’ve been thinking your names were two, and now you can get five. I think that’s the type of thing that’s happening with sellers in the market. So if you’re going in to buy one of the best things you can do, I think is clearly do the work to establish what you’re willing to pay for the domain name.

And a lot of times you can ask a little bit more. You can offer a little bit more than what the seller thought he was going to get for the name to lock it up, get a transaction done and dusted. You have the name? He has the money before someone starts thinking, well, I wonder if someone else will pay more.

I wonder if someone else will pay more. And if you’re a company out there buying a domain name for $2 million and 10 years from now, you’re probably going to look back and say, that’s one of the best investments our company ever made. It’s probably likely [00:43:00] that you’re going to have the same feeling, whether you paid $2.2 million or $2 million.

So if you can kind of shock and awe a seller by paying a little bit more than they think they wanted, or you think that they would sell for to make sure you get the name, that’s going to stop you from going through another process that can happen with million dollar domain names. And I’ll close with this.

A lot of buyers and sellers of million-dollar domain names have been going back and forth with each other for years. With the seller constantly moving the price up to 500,000 to 800,000 to a million to 2,000,008. The buyer always wanting to pay about 30% less than the name was being offered at. They never come to a deal.

And in times, like the last couple of years, when the market gets better, the seller [00:44:00] moves their price up. And that buyer is constantly chasing that price up because they always want to get a deal. They always want to get it for a little bit less than the seller wanted. They want to win the negotiation.

Can I think if you’re buying as a collector or it’s not a name you really need, it’s the name you’d like to have, but if you, if you’re a company that’s in charge of buying an asset, that’ll help it out. I think you’ve got a chance once you’ve made the decision, you’ve got buy-in among all your various groups.

That this was the way to go. I think you need to take the name down, try to get a transaction done because if not, you can be chasing it for years as that seller keeps moving, the bogey keeps moving the target. So anyway, that’s what I wanted to talk about and get on the podcast for today. And I appreciate everybody joining me here in the live studio audience of a [00:45:00] clubhouse.

And I’d be interested to see if anyone has any thoughts, positive or negative on what I’ve shared about million dollar domain names about the market. And to summarize about this idea as we really dived into last week, that in a domain transaction for a million dollar domain name, the buyer’s equation is this will the benefits that this asset offer me offers me, will the benefit benefit that this name offers me be worth more over time.

Then the money I have to spend to buy it. And right now there’s a chance, in my opinion, that million dollar domain names are being bought and sold sometimes based upon the benefit that they’re going to provide for the, in the short term, just to help get a deal closed, to help get a funding done, um, to kind of check a box that accompany went with two words [00:46:00] and everyone always says, well, why don’t you just get the one word?

And they’re just like, yeah, let’s go ahead and get it. And they’re making this decision based upon the shortest of term thinking. And, and I think in many cases, you know, you, you’ve got a chance where when you start applying the benefits of these names over time, and you started accumulating the benefits over 10 and 20 years, That I think it is going to make people look back on some of the values that are happening today and say, remember when, remember when in 22, so back to this equation or the benefits that a buyer’s going to get worth more than the money they have to spend.

And now we have this idea right now that the money they’re spending might be decreasing in value as unused and uninvested cash is subject to kind of an inflation depreciation of as much as 7% a year [00:47:00] versus the fact that if your company does two or $3 million with the business or 20 or 30 or 200 or 300, you’re probably going to be slowly raising your prices.

And if a good domain name helps your business, one to five or 10%, its value is going to compound over the years and its earnings power. There’s going to be applied to a bigger and bigger number, which means if in the future five and 10 years from now, you sell a domain name for 20 times its earning power or 10 times or five times or a hundred times.

That number is going to be even greater than probably what you paid for it today. So anyway, that’s the equation. Let’s see if I have prompted any questions from anybody.

All right. If anyone’s got a million dollar [00:48:00] domain name, they’ve got a question about a domain name. They’re thinking about buying. Uh, I’ll kind of do a little, ask me anything here on million dollar domain names or what do I think? And then if you’ve got a show on clubhouse this week, I really think clubhouse.

Even though the number of people in the domain space that are using it may have dropped the platforms actually gotten better. And so I think I’m going to start to do more off clubhouse publicity to bring a lot of people back because between being able to chat during the shows, being able to do clips, being able to do replays, be able to listen to podcasts.

Um, I think the platforms actually gotten better and improved, uh, since it started. And, um, and I think it can be valuable. And even though there’s Twitter spaces and some other things that happen, you know, I think clubhouse, if it came out again today, I think, uh, I think it might be the best [00:49:00] audio chat out there.

So let’s see what’s going on, Dr. How are you doing today?

What brings you up on stage? You have to hit your mute button off.

All right. That’s fantastic. I congratulate you. Did you have a question about domain names today? No, they are. I don’t have such type of questions, but, uh, one thing I want to say that, what about the bar? What do you think about what we think it should be stuff? Yes, I do believe war should be stopped, but, um, there’s some great rooms out there and clubhouse.

I listened to a lot of people that have different opinions on that. And we’re going to talk about million dollar domains here. So I’m going to go ahead and move you down to the audience. [00:50:00] All right, let’s see. We have a question from the chat. Can you say something about the value difference between two word with or without the hyphen?

It’s a good question.

The hyphen, um, the thoughts about hyphens and domain names haven’t changed in 15 or 20 years. There’s literally like one article that was done that said Germans like hyphens and everyone repeats that article over and over again. Um, and then there’s a thought that the hyphens are terrible for domain names.

Um, And, and that started from the fact that when we first used to navigate with our little Motorola flip phones, you had to switch the entire screen that you were on to type in a hyphen. So if I was Joe domains and you were typing [00:51:00] in the web address, you’d have to type in Joe, then switch screens, hit the hyphen sign, then go back and hit domains.

And whether you’re texting or whether you’re typing in a browser, you know, functionally, that was just difficult. But I think the big thing that hyphens have going against them is the fact that they’re always going to be compared to who has the domain name without the hyphen. Now, when, if you’re doing a site for Google and you just need something, anything, cause you’re going to spend $10,000 a month, you know, buying paid advertising traffic, I think a hyphen domains.

But I think if you’re trying to extract value from somebody, I think it’s always going to be about the same as a.net, maybe two word hyphen. So if I had baseball cards.net and I had baseball-cards.com, [00:52:00] I’d say those are probably going to be about the same. They’re both one off of the best thing, baseball cards.com, but it’s all going to be up to people’s personal feeling.

There may be some people say I would never buy a hyphen. I might buy the.net. And then other people might say, I don’t want to die. So I think that, you know, opinions are going to be varied, but most of the time you’re dealing with a subpar domain name and you’re trying to ask people, you’re trying to get them to think how much less valuable is this domain name than what you really want.

And 10, will you pay me something for that domain name as a seller? And I just think it’s a frustrating, you know, part of the business to be in. But if you have hyphenated domain names and you list them on after Nick, I think they’ll sell, they’ll sell about the same as other domain names. If you have a hundred of them, you might sell three a year.

If they’re good. [00:53:00] I mean, if they’re good, two words that go together and you’ve priced them, right? So I’m not as against them as some other people, but you’re going to have to commit to renewing them maybe three to six years again, to sell three out of every hundred. So that’s the best thing I can say.

let’s see, we’ve got one other person popping up. Well, they’re not there anymore. Let’s see if anybody else is in the chat, uh, hyphen task. My, this that is true. Whether it’s a hyphen, a Dasher of mine is thanks, Jeff. You have to say it in a different way. And I think it’s funny because that applies to the dot also.

Um, I think one of the things that th the people that are in new TLDs don’t realize, but I learned it a long time ago with.tv. Was that I [00:54:00] really had to feel when I sold people, TV, domain names that they’re buying a.tv because that.is going to be part of their name. You know, um, w when I do the work I do with.la, you know, you’re going to be restaurants.la and, and the dot really becomes a part of it.

But I think with comm, if your company’s called restaurants, your company is called Joe domains. The calm is kind of assumed. Um, let’s see, someone asked about FSD cars.com full self-driving, apparently as what FSD stands for. So I liked the idea of going for future trends. Um, and I think it’s good to know a word that’s, you know, maybe everyone went for self-driving cars.

People went for autonomous cars. I’m sure people have gone horizontal, meaning they bought all kinds of autonomous car blog, [00:55:00] autonomous car guide by autonomous cards. I think they’ve probably gone vertical buying atonomous cards and all kinds of other TLDs. So you found another abbreviation that might be just as good.

And I would just encourage you that if you were able to find it four years ago, I would feel better about your name, but if you just bought this in the last month, that means that no one else in the world thought they were going to be called FSD car. And I think when you buy low value names or hand reds names to try to catch a trend, the part that’s the most dangerous is when you had to be super early to buy it, the word hasn’t really caught on and you may have to wait three or four years for it to catch on.

So I haven’t seen FSD a lot, but it sounds like full self-driving. It’s a lot easier than saying autonomous. [00:56:00] So I kinda like it.

Let’s see, Sam asks, what are your thoughts on domain hacks? I think they’re cute. Um, You know, it’s a good area to invest in because you can use your creativity to go find a name, maybe. And for those of you who are listening, domain hacks means your you’re creating a word like maybe if you had crypto, which is C R Y P T O, maybe you found a way to buy C R Y p.to you.

And Tio is an aggressively marketed, but rarely used extension. Um, it used to be used for Toronto or two, but anyways, so say you buy at CR wipey dot Tio. So you just want to say our company is called crypto and it’s kind of cute and you have a little.in your logo. So that’s a good example of one of the best acts that might be out there.

And what you’re hoping is [00:57:00] you’re hoping that someone else also thinks. And they want to pay a bunch of money for it. Most of the time, people that are creative are trying to use their creativity to save money. So they may think, well, I’m going to think of another cool domain hack where I don’t have to pay you as the domain investor, a bunch of money.

So I can save myself a lot of money with my creativity. But if you do stumble upon something that’s valuable, it’s really going to be a discretionary purchase by someone who just says, yeah, I want it. And you’re going to have to catch them at the right time. Even wholesale investors. Aren’t going to give you a big price for a hack because most of the time, I think they’re going to say.

I can go figure out my own and buy it for a cheap price. But anyway, those are my thoughts on hacks. Let’s see. I like this chat thing. It does allow me to answer more questions. Let’s see what we [00:58:00] have. Doug. You’ve been a great guest for me. Acquaint site build it. And incurrence hyphens.

Yeah. Well, Mike Gilman, our resident researchers come up with 4,000 domains that start with FSD. I may have to rethink my initial opinion of FSD. Thanks Mike.

Yeah, someone commented about the German, uh, the German thing for hyphens. And again, I think it all comes from one blog post years ago. Anybody think, thank you everybody for coming to million dollar domains today. Um, You can, uh, you can follow me here on clubhouse. You can hit the link. If you’re listening to a replay to follow domain club, um, we are going to increase the offerings that we’re doing on domain club.

If you’re listening here and you want to do a [00:59:00] room and domain club during the week, you can do it whenever you want, or you can have a scheduled time and, um, we can make you kind of an expert or, you know, a moderator in domain club. And when you start your room, there’ll be notifications that go out to the 36 or 3,700 people in domain club.

And we just kind of offer that up. Uh, we don’t charge anything and, and we don’t pay anything. So it’s a zero, zero sum game, but, um, you know, it might be able to give you a little community to help start a show here on clubhouse. And then I would come in and try to help you and give you a little boost.

And, uh, and you know, I think there’s probably. Eight or nine really good weekly shows, you know, on clubhouse. And there’s a great community that seems to be on here all the time. So anyway, I wanted to offer that out for domain club. I would encourage everyone if they can, and they have any extra money. Uh, I know either through Namecheap or through, [01:00:00] um, other companies that are supporting a lot of the people in Ukraine, um, through the domain community where some of the domain companies have a lot of people working there.

I think if you go to Namecheap, they’ve got linked to a pretty trusted charity where, you know, the money is going to go to the right place. But I do want to say a prayer and put my, my best thoughts, uh, for the people in Ukraine right now. And thanks everybody for coming. We’ll see you next week on million dollar domains.[01:01:00]