Domain Market

How much is Mike Mann making from domain names per year?

Mike Mann made 2 comments that combined offered a glimpse at his domain name business: how much he is grossing per year and how many domains he is selling.

Mike Mann is the owner of DomainMarket.com that offers more than 250,000 premium domain names for sale. Mike shares some of his sales and purchases on social media. Here is the latest domain name report.

First he said that the average premium domain sales price at Domain Market.com is now at $2,600. Average has doubled since last year.

That on itself doesn’t say much about sales volume but then he make comment that might have gone unnoticed.

He said “I did half that on my private little market” commenting on a post saying that Namejet sold $725k worth of domains in November 2016.

So he did about $362,500 is sales in November and $4.35 million in the past year. (of course all these numbers are all estimates and not exact or scientific)

If you divide $4.35 million by $2,600 then you get about 1,673 domains per year or 139 domains per month.

So Mike Mann’s portfolio annual turnaround is less than 1% at about 0.0067.

It is always good to see what the annual turnaround of a large portfolio as this is as close as one can get to understanding the secondary market of the domain name industry.

Finally, these numbers mean that Mike Mann makes about $2.35 million from domain name sales (if you take out $2 million for domain renewals on 250,000 names) minus of course all other expenses.

Some people think that Mike is not selling enough domains to cover his renewals. I find it a bit odd that people think that. Why would he lie, keep renewing all these domains and keep losing money? Just to seem like a big shot on twitter and fool a few domainers? I don’t get it. And what money is he supposed to be losing? The money he made from selling BuyDomains.com? The business he built and sold because he was so good at buying and selling domain names? Come on people…

Sold.Domains

About Konstantinos Zournas

I studied Computer Engineering and Computer Science in London, UK and I am now living in Athens, Greece. I went online in 1995, started coding in 1996 and began buying domain names and creating websites in 2000. I started the OnlineDomain.com blog in 2012.

21 comments

  1. Mike Mann is not the “Man”, he is the most over-rated domainer in the industry. Follow Rick Swartz.

  2. It is a game of scale and of course, skill.

    You make so much per 1,000 names.

    Good for him.

  3. Sorry but I think it’s not easy like that..it’s not a piece of cake …while the apps in Google play increasing everyday and so are th smartphone users …apps replacing domains soon

    • Who said it is easy? Apps are not replacing domains.
      But dumb smartphone users are increasing and that is a universal problem.

    • Apps are not replacing domains soon. There is a blowback amongst consumers against apps right now. Consumers don’t want to download yet another company’s app to their smartphones and learn how to use it and have to keep updating it just to get notifications from the company. They’d much rather receive a simple text message via SMS. So, there is app fatigue out there. SMS and domain names will make apps less relevant over the long term.

  4. Great analysis. But how did you come up with an annual turnaround of just 0.0067?

    1,673 sales/year represents 0.66% of his portfolio, based on 250K domains.

    That sounds about right when taking into consideration that the industry standard for most volume holders is currently around 1%-2%.

    When pricing domains within the typical small-medium end user sweet spot range ($1.5K-$3.5K), you can expect a higher % of annual sales. When a certain % of your portfolio is priced well above this range, you can expect the yearly sales rate to be lower (as is the case with DM at just over half a percent)

  5. Would it be a fair assumption to presume that the portfolio is not shrinking from sales but rather Mike is constantly acquiring new names? Would it also be a reasonable assumption that the average domain sold cost more than reg fee (perhaps considerably more than reg fee) and that current acquisitions on average also cost quite a bit more than reg fee? So to maintain the inventory, how much in additional cost has to be considered (over and above renewal of names which do not sell)?

    • “Would it be a fair assumption to presume that the portfolio is not shrinking from sales but rather Mike is constantly acquiring new names?”
      Yes, Mike has said so.

      “Would it also be a reasonable assumption that the average domain sold cost more than reg fee (perhaps considerably more than reg fee) and that current acquisitions on average also cost quite a bit more than reg fee? So to maintain the inventory, how much in additional cost has to be considered (over and above renewal of names which do not sell)?”
      He has also said that new acquisition cost remains low.

  6. “Why would he lie..?”
    Hahaha.
    Why he registered and still register so many trademarks (facebook, Microsoft,..) domains?
    He already got many UDRPa but he still doing this.

    He keep all these names because he does what most gamblers and lottery players.
    Hoping for a big day.

    I do not believe he is successful in domains. He is the type of guy who if sells something runs around and tell everybody. Probably low self-esteem. And what he told around is not much, if we take into account how many domains he owns.

    I remember an article when he contacted a guy from one website and paid him to write about him.
    They guy first asked why should I write about you? 🙂

    • “He keep all these names because he does what most gamblers and lottery players.
      Hoping for a big day.”

      No Ada, anyone knows that you can’t make money from buying trademark domains. This is not why he is doing it.

      “I do not believe he is successful in domains.”
      OK. Whatever… So Mike is losing money just so you couple of guys are impressed. Sure…
      People are free to believe whatever madness they want.

    • He spends $2 million a year on renewals to lose money because he has low self esteem. It makes him feel better about himself 🙂 How much do you lose to boost your self-esteem?

      • How about, how much it cost you to boost your self-esteem? My answer is big “Zero” either you have self-esteem or you don’t! The rest is history. ?

  7. There are no two ways to interpret his highly-successful business model – despite a few areas that may be frowned upon.

    AFTER investments, acquisitions & renewals, he is making 6 figures profit each and every month – period.
    He has one of the most trained eagle-eyes within the industry.

  8. I wonder if he registered new domain names from the ICANN new gTLD program.

  9. I think only Mike Mann can answer this. His digital assets at DomainMarket.com are inspiring. Why do we have to speculate about his business net income again and again?. It’s not our business. He shares his sales and we should appreciate it. I wish he gets onto GTLDs like Mike Berkens and Frank Schilling.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.