OnlineDomain.com Domain Name News & Opinions
Mike Mann wrote an EPIC comment on my post about him dropping 50,000. The comment covers several different subjects including buying and selling domain names.
To get some context you should first read these 3 posts before reading Mike Mann’s comment.
- Mike Mann drops 50,000 domains
- Complete list of the 50,000 domains Mike Mann dropped
- Mike Mann: 2 lists of 28,923 available domains
You can read the complete comment here:
Please see MikeMann.com which has links to my charitable work, books, companies, videos, and best practices.
The reason it is extra difficult to make money on selling domains is because the system is a huge scam, and some of the people. Some are a lot like Wall Street scammers (they have suits), but from a more tiny and opaque industry; and with more of a DC and Boston connection than New York and San Francisco.
Even if the system were not a scam, it would be very hard to make a profit, as in any evolving high-tech business. Most people quit or retired, or sold out super cheap due to monopolistic and illegal practices of others. (Which leaves me in a great position to dominate the future; weak competition and the most skilled team)
This article explains the situation pretty well http://www.circleid.com/posts/president_of_buydomainscom_responds_to_wls_issue
Also, this video: https://vimeo.com/311805335
The contracts for Verisign/NSI, and the auctions are no competition monopolies; the auctions are fraudulent on their face, and then some of the employees and customers in them have done shill bidding and other scams for ages unhindered, and not prosecuted (yet).
Everyone is being taxed exorbitantly on .Com and other traditional domains by monopolies with uncontrollable prices, and NO COMPETITION.
Friends in DC long ago got campaign donations, along with other insider scams. NTIA/Sen. Warner/DoC/ICANN, etc.
I visited and spoke to the Justice Department and various congresspeople to lobby about it with Paul Stahura (before he went to the dark side of gTLDs).
ICANN is an enormous scam that was supposed to help domain owners, not take mega-millions for themselves.
.Org seems to have gone south in a similar manner, but the CA attorney general is stepping in apparently.
Trump people, what happened to draining the swamp? How did you miss this? How did every other tax get deferred and scam get exposed except domains? Those big companies want you to lose the best domains and not get paid anything, so they can auction them, or just steal and sell them. They work together on it.
Suffice to say nobody is happy about me talking about it, and none of the other “domain press” want to go there because: A. They are too nice, and see the players at fancy conventions constantly B. They need the advertising dollars and financial relationships.
If you know me, you’ll know that I don’t play any games.
Speaking of not playing games, don’t be like weak competitors. If you want to play follow these concepts, and let me know what I’m missing.
Buying domains:
Only buy .Com, it’s hard enough to make money here. The gTLD system was a big lie, never going to gain traction; you wasted your money. Some are good and may sell, but there are so few, and they are controlled by insiders, I can’t imagine how an amateur could make any traction.
There over 100 million .Com already registered. There is no point in registering more unless you know something I don’t know. The object is to buy the best ones that exist already at the lowest prices possible, and sell them at the highest.
So make filters; and use software, programmers, existing web services, and consultants, etc.
MAIN TRAITS TO LOOK FOR BUYING:
-.Com
-Clear English
-Make sure many companies could benefit from its exact spelling usage; study it in Google; always use Boolean operators to make sure you filtered for the correct best stuff. + – “ “ etc.
-No trademarks or porn or typos, or bitcoin
-If other companies have other domains with the exact string it implies the domain is better
-If it’s medical, finance, high-tech related, may be better
-Comps
-Etc.
The more qualifications it has simultaneously the better.
The good news is they are way underpriced in general for the best stuff. Other stuff is worth $0 given the maintenance cost, so it’s overpriced out of the gate.
A great domain could be worth $5,000, or $50,0000, or once in a while $500,000 for example, but extremely hard to sell at any fair price regardless of its intrinsic worth to a company; because premium domain names are an illiquid marketspace; the potential buyers have been told domains aren’t worth much and they have no way to distinguish between a great and useless domain, nor do they care on average.
So, this sucks, except you can usually buy those same domains for less than a thousand dollars, sometimes $10. If you have a lot of money and time and filters and programmers; and buy enough of the very best .Com domains at the very lowest prices like I do, then you will likely build an extremely valuable domain portfolio (Google: Frank Shilling, Mike Berkens, Yun Yi, Kevin Ham to see what they did) …..unless you screw up.
Even if you do perfectly, it will be very expensive to maintain the portfolio; or sell your company at a fair price given all the scammers and taxes; keeping in mind traditional investors or lenders have no interest in domain names.
My competitors have mostly been offshore, and not hiring US employees or paying US taxes, or other US laws, so it has been a financial competitive disadvantage for me and other law-abiding Americans.
Selling domains:
-The trick to selling domains at a decent price is leaving the correct appraised price listed publicly for a long time, so the potential customer knows they weren’t singled out; and if they negotiate a discount they’ll think they are kings.
-Make sure to use the popular brokerage services, keeping in mind the who owns them though.
-Make sure you have the right price by using my service AccurateAppraisals.com, because if it’s priced too high it will never sell (but you still have to pay for renewals and other expenses); and if it’s too low you’d end up losing your potentially large upside.
-Set up your own web site and sales process;
-Make sure every domain has an SSL landing page with some good information about domains, and the subject matter of that domain too.
-Set up social media sites and make some noise like me
-Delete domains that don’t show any demand from potential buyers, or traffic, or enough Boolean based matches in Google
-And read my book, MakeMillions.com for the best sales practices all around for any growing business.
That’s about it. Follow me on Social and LMK if you have any questions. Be safe. Peace. -MM
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You are the only guy sir who has respect from my heart in domaining industry. Else I hv seen big big names in domaining industry doing cheating for their small benefits. More power to you sir.
Mike dropped 16% of his 300k domains, so IMO it was a personal decision based on the financial costs of managing a domain portfolio of that size.
It was closer to 14%.
Sound advice. Mike has been in the business long enough to know how it all works. I would agree with most of his comments but I prefer a smaller portfolio of generic .com then a huge portfolio which is expensive to maintain year after year. The upside to a large portfolio is when a company like GoDaddy offers to pay hundreds of dollars for hundreds of thousands of domain names. They add up to hundreds of millions of dollars.
I just left this reply under Mike Mann’s there:
• “what happened to draining the swamp?”
People were duped and didn’t realize that was a con, like that episode of The Twilight Zone where it turns out to be a cookbook at the end.
“Drain the swamp” never meant what people were conned into believing. It meant draining the swamp to find the creatures at the very bottom to install in the cabinet and other important positions of power, including war criminals and the like. The swamp was already drained, and drained well.
• “Suffice to say nobody is happy about me talking about it, and none of the other “domain press” want to go there because: A. They are too nice, and see the players at fancy conventions constantly B. They need the advertising dollars and financial relationships.”
Yes, exactly what I’ve been talking about for years, and why it’s good and important for blog commenters to be able to post anonymously who feel more at liberty to say things which need to be said but won’t be. Someone like you doing it is simply a very rare anomaly and there’s not nearly enough.
The Twilight Zone reference I think was called ‘Serving Humans’ – a nice play on the use of the word ‘serving’, and ‘yes’ it turned out to be a cookbook. (One of the Twilight Zone’s best IMO.)
Thanks, Bill. Yes, definitely one of the best episodes of them all and a true classic.
I may occasionally disagree with Mike’s political commentary but I respect him for who he is and for speaking his mind. I actually read Mike’s comment/post last night. Very impressive.
He is the real DOMAIN KING 🙂
… Just when cats and dogs where starting to live in harmony, you go and poke the tiger. haha
Oh my…
20 years of believing and I am also dropping my domains.
“Drain the swamp”–yea he did drain the swamp but is refilled with his own people that thinks like him
Completely agree with MM esp the auctions….all is rigged.
You have no idea who you are bidding against.
I have complained tens of times about these damn auctions. No one cares.
In the last month alone:
GoDaddy
Namejet
and
Namejet
The Swamp turned into an Estuary filled with gators. I like some of what Mike says. Rick Schwartz has been teaching the same things for decades to those who wanted to listen. The only thing I disagree with Mike is when he plugs his AccurateAppraisals.com a service that costs money in an industry which he calls rigged.
I’d advise all of you to send a friendly email to Rick Schwartz asking his help on pricing and I can gurantee you he will say the same thing he told me years ago. “Your domain name is only worth what you want it for and what you agree to sell it to the potential buyer”. (This advise works for me. I have sold 7 domains this year with little godaddy or that othercrappyapprisal tool value; for 170K and in the process of selling 1 .ca for more than that.)
If you know how to use your brain, you’d realize that what Rick said is ask what you want and an interested buyer will negotiate with you. So wasting your money or time on appraisal services is another scam on top of many.
The biggest fraud in the domain industry has been the Registrars taking ownership and monetising dropping domains instead of deleting them.
One day hopefully, that will be fully investigated.
All hail Drewbert ! Drewbert is back. I hope you are well dude.
I don’t see how dropping 50,000 names has anything to do with 1/2 of what Mike says .
He is right about ICANN, not fit for purpose, we get this sort of thing all the time with these sort of organisations.
Symptoms include
Spending other peoples money
Overspending
Bloated board
Unapproachable
Sell their soul
In UK we have regulators such as OFCOM, OFGEM etc they are exactly the same.
So figure this out
You create “gigs” of non exec director type board members who used to be or are in the industry you are regulating, so who are their friends? The same Fking idiots who are the greedy Cnuts ruining this industry.
It seems to me that for ALL TLD’s there should be a 90 day redemption period where you can renew your domains without the registar you pay money to each year sticking them in auction.
Imagine if shareholder registrars did that, there would be a massive uprising.
I do pro-active selling of my domains, targetted at people I know will need them, I am not greedy, usually based on income and real value to buyer.
Now I am going to sell all I can in the next 90 days, I may then pay the next 10 years of subs for those that remain and stick them on Dan.
I do think Mike has missed a trick, with his inventory I would have thought he could afford to outsource the sale of those 50,000 domains on a commission only basis, payment by results. If he could have sold 500 at $1000 he would have paid for the renewal of the 50,000. Obviously prices vary but if he had put an article on this site saying he was looking for people to partner with to sell them.
What he has lost with these domains is the age, these days this is a ranking factor that could have been used effectively to generate income.
He could also have rented them out to blog networks, I did that as a business until I got to busy but he could probably have afforded to get a VA to manage it. The hilarious thing is that I had people asking me to REMOVE articles and I charged them $60 per article to remove them. (These were domains on a slightly shady blog network), typically a company would have 3 to 20 articles per site.
With 50,000 domains you could create your own blog network and that would be a profit centre in it’s own right. The beauty of it is that you do not need to do any work or you can employ VA’s in .PH and create them for specific companies.
What will be interesting is to see how many of these domains have been registered in 90 days time.