OnlineDomain.com Domain Name News & Opinions
Mike Mann is ready to launch his new domain appraisal site at AccurateAppraisals.com and he has even put up a form for people to sign up as domain name appraisers.
He made a post about this on Facebook and also debated on what the current value of a domain name is today.
On my opinion it is very difficult to put a value on a domain name. There are many things to consider. Domains are not like stocks or anything else. They are a category on their own. I think that the more domains you have the easier it gets to put a wholesale value on them. Just like GoDaddy does with the big portfolio purchases. If course the bigger the portfolio the smaller is the average price paid per domain.
There are a lot of domains that are liquid. You might not get the end-user price but you WILL sell them.
When you want to sell something fast then other rules apply in practically everything. (everything except those that are traded daily and have closely monitored prices like stocks or gold) Imagine you have a warehouse full of TVs. If each costs $1,000 retail and you sell them $500 wholesale then a price at about $400 is very good if you need to sell them all and fast. If you want to sell your house today you can’t expect to get full value, and so on.
“Is the current value of an asset its liquidation value today, or a discount to the future profits you expect to make? In a liquid market like Wall Street they are practically the same, with a tiny bid:ask spread, but in domain names there is no liquid market, and very poor public education on the value of super premium .Com domain names for corporations.
For example I own HappyBirthday.com that I’m positive is worth millions of dollars in marketing value to many companies and app developers, not to mention for Hallmark, and will go up in value with worldwide internet growth, but today if I had to liquidate it I’d be lucky to get $500K.
To make domains liquid they need good quality crowd averaged certified appraisals from the world’s best appraisers to become real liquid assets traded on a real marketplace, where fair valuations can be realized from sellers and investors and everyone profits, including brokers and lawyers and registration/hosting companies.
This is what we are planning to do with AccurateAppraisals.com, then broker them on a site to be called BrokeragePlus.com, on our DomainMarket.com site, our landing pages, and via our partner relationships with their syndicated selling networks, reaching hundreds of registration and hosting company web sites and apps.”
domain appraisals will remain meaningless until someone stands behind them to offer loans at some fixed percentage of appraisal value.
Life is often full of ironies.
This “project” amounts to nothing less than a declaration of war on the entire industry. Just another money grab at the expense of others.