OnlineDomain.com Domain Name News & Opinions
Mike Mann reported selling 4 domain names in October for a total of $83,388. Prices started at $9,888 and went up to $38,500.
I hope there is not someone that thinks that these are all the domains that Mike sold in October. These are just the domains that he chose to report. Also he is purchasing hundreds of domains each month yet he reports only 1 or 2.
If people were selling only what they were reporting then I wouldn’t have any sales this year!
Highest reported sale was HighGrade.com that sold for $38,500.
All 4 of the sold domains were .com. The average reported domain sales price was $20,847.
Mike Mann will soon be launching AccurateAppraisals.com.
Here is a look at some of Mike Mann’s domain acquisitions and sales from October 2017.
Domain name sales:
CoolDomains.com $15,000. Purchased 6/2/16 $5500.
CompleteWell.com $9888. Purch. 1.15.09 $7.
ProPages.com $20,000. Purch 11.1.07 $2005.
HighGrade.com $38,500. Purch. 2.21.95 $350.
Domain name purchases:
VIPVic.com $10
BlackLifesMatter.com $20
Mike Mann is the owner of DomainMarket.com that offers more than 290,000+ premium domain names for sale. Mike probably sold more domains as he is not reporting all his (lower) sales. Yes, his overall sales average is below $5,000 so the reported average of $20,000+ means that there were quite a few not reported sales for less than $5,000.
(One thing to remember is that Mike Mann needs to sell about $2.5+ million worth of domains per year to break even and that he is NOT a flipper. The average holding time for his sold domains is usually more than 5 years.)
Here are all the Mike Mann’s sold domain name reports published on OnlineDomain.com in 2016 and 2017:
September 2017
August 2017
July 2017
June 2017
May 2017
April 2017
March 2017
February 2017
January 2017
December 2016
November 2016
October 2016
September 2016
August 2016
July 2016
May 2016
April 2016
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HighGrade.com was registered in 2001, so that 1995 acquisition date is not accurate. Maybe 2005?
Probably yes…
Alright, someone tell me why Mike Mann still owns domains he acquired in the early 2000’s or earlier even though he sold Buydomains and supposedly started over from scratch?
When he sold the business he probably kept a few domains. That would have been in the agreement.
Berkens kept the adult domains and the new gtlds (probably because GoDaddy didn’t want them) but he also kept other domains such as thedomains.com.
If am I ever asked to sell my portfolio I would probably keep a few domains too. That would be the deal from the beginning.
Great returns, he maybe loses alot of sales with high asking prices, but sure makes up for it with these above average ask prices.
He makes a lot of lower priced sales. This is what he tweeted today:
“Sold 15 premium .Com so far today, mostly too cheap, one for $4888”
Most of those domains are either garbage or worth little for a real end user, so I really have to wonder if there’s a scam behind this “reporting.” And it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve wondered that for various particular sales in general (i.e., not just his).
What domains are garbage?
If there is one thing I have learnt over the years with domaining it is that A DOMAIN IS WORTH WHAT SOMEONE IS PREPARED TO PAY FOR IT.
Years ago I built my own private blog network, I was buying expiring domains that had high PR and quickly recreating the PR profile to maintain the PR. This led to me picking up domains that I would ordinarily not touch at all, domains with nothing visibly special, e.g. things like RG3F.com.
I will not bore you with the detail but I used one such domain for selling links via a link sharing platform, then one day Google brought out penguin and panda crawls that demoted such domains and stripped them of their PR. Since then Google has stopped showing PR so we have to rely on 3rd parties.
So I was left with a domain that cost me $8 to register and and max of $10 a year for around 5 years, I had my ROI from selling links, but how much would someone pay for this domain?
Well when doing my monthly analysis of what domains are worth keeping, promoting or using, I figured I would let this domain expire as I really could not imagine anyone being dumb enough to pay for it.
I did my final checks of other TLD’s and found that someone had registered the primary TLD’s of ,Org, .Net and even a few others. I checked out the domain and it was in commercial use and all the TLD’s pointed to the .ORG.
So I fired off an email to offer my .COM variant of their similar domain (note they had no trademark), but what price should I offer? Here you have to make a guess at their income, the value of their brand. My domain had the oldest registration so it had age value.
I went in at $8000, of course I got the usual, thanks but no way we are interested at that price, the max we would pay is $200, that told me they were interested, so I countered with $5000, they were quite hostile and said the max they would pay was $1000. So still interested, I came back saying that based on age value and the income we were getting from the domain we would auction it with the existing content so the minimum we would accept was $3850 they came back saying their final offer was $2000 and not to bother writing to them unless we were prepared to pay that. Of course I went back and offered our final price of $2850 with them paying all escrow fees including our own.
Deal accepted and completed.
This was largely a matter of being in the right place at the right time. I might have held out for their biz to become bigger but that has two risks, they go bust or they get big enough to get a trademark.
Despite this success I think we all have to take on board the concept of a sunk cost, for me the domain mentioned the article
BlackLifesMatter.com
Is a futile registration, it should have been BlackLiVesMatter and if you look at Google predict you will see that when people do make a spelling mistake it is BlackLifeMatters so only ill informed or ignorant people would ever buy that domain.
How any unpaid appraisal system or even paid one could predict the value of domains is difficult and always going to be at best, a guess.
Considering that we all have that sunken cost remose and different appetites for risk, then perhaps a business approach would be to give yourself a budget if either number domains or cost of renewals per annum with predicted YTD cost each month. The way I do it is to force myself to sacrifice one domain for another, I also give myself a month to let a domain go for my investment since I acquired it.