Why is it so hard to sell domains now?

[Restecpa]

Solid advice on domain investments! Pictures.net, with its concise and memorable name, holds great potential as a versatile and marketable domain in the visual content and photography space. It's a great name suitable for diverse applications such as multimedia sharing platforms, graphic design resources, or even a community hub for creative enthusiasts. And now, in the trending area of generative AI ventures within the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence and creative algorithms.

Ironically, spoken just like true AI As a matter of fact, at the very least you must be using some kind of writing aid, because this is just too much like it... am I correct?

 

[Restecpa]

Hi

i've had hundreds of sales and didn't have to do any strategic marketing.
only marketing if any, is to list on various aftermarket platforms and let them do the work for us.

the key to success is having domains that buyers are looking for.
this way, you don't have to spam unsuspecting victims with email solicitations to buy your domains.

imo...

Assuming your goal is to sell to end users though and not re-sellers/investors, do you really find the aftermarket platforms to be sufficient for that? I don't think enough end users search those, and many potential buyers might not even consider your domain being for sale once their registrar tells them it's already registered (when they attempt to reg it themselves).

I'm not into the whole spam thing either, but can't help but feel that getting several potential end users (such as companies with the exact same name or industry as your domain) to your listing and eventual auction would fetch you a much better price... The questions is, how to get them there without emailing or calling them?

 

[Biggie]

Assuming your goal is to sell to end users though and not re-sellers/investors, do you really find the aftermarket platforms to be sufficient for that?

Hi

the goal is to make a profit on the sale of any domain, regardless to who the buyer may be.

there are many domainers/investors who have just as much or more capital at their disposal,
than the vague "end-user" that everybody claims to only sell domains to.

i sell to whoever is willing to pay asking price or close to it.

the aftermarket platforms are pretty good at making sales happen.
typically, last 5 > 10 years, on average i sell about 2-3 names per year.
though some years are better than others

imo...

The questions is, how to get them there without emailing or calling them?

Hi

the answer,
is to have domains that will appeal to more than a single buyer,
yet each could be just the right domain, for a specific purpose.

 

[Alex Jones]

i think the competition is very high

 

[accurate]

Economy is weak and VCs aren't investing in start-ups.

 

[VirtualT]

Hi

no smart domainer will buy crappy names and many stay away from new extensions.

and no one wants to hold and pay renewal for domains you are giving away for free.

this is not an easy, sell fast, get rich quick, type of business.

imo...

Still doing the IMO thing aye?

 

[shaerif]

.com is still the gold and the oldest extension available

 

[ethanhenry]

Selling domains can be challenging due to various factors outlined in the search results. One reason is that some domain names may not attract buyers due to weaknesses in their names or lack of demand in the market.

 

[AmritaB]

The real reason you notice a difference is that in the last couple of years Godaddy has bought up almost all of the domain aftermarket sites, including Dan.com, Bodis, DomainAgents, and they already owned Afternic, Above, and others. The only real competitor to Godaddy's near monopoly is Sedo which is still a great company.

Without sugar coating it, Godaddy's systems are terrible, things like not having SSL, broken landing pages, listing errors, general clunky infrastructure, very slow support, not friendly to cheaper domains in terms of their standard sales flow, and so you have this one main dominating company that has the worst sales flow and support typically, and they then retrofit and change the internals of sites like Dan etc and actually degrade what was working there many times. So the bigger the monopoly continues to get, the worse sales will be because they have less and less incentive to provide a quality service, when the monopoly catches enough business to sustain itself without much effort.

If that wasn't enough, if you are lucky like me and have one of their own ad providers send a visitor to your landing page and decide to ban you for it even though it was their advertising system, they will quietly ban you from things like getting landing revenue and will not tell you that has been done either, they will keep letting your traffic in but will also simply stop paying you. Domain listings also might not syndicate, etc., if you are put on the "bad" list even due to no fault of your own. Then as a domainer, you get to spend years trying to figure out what is wrong and waste thousansd of dollars only to have them eventually tell you years later that oh yeah we banned you at nearly every company that exists to sell domains at, sorry.

 

[Biggie]

Bodis, DomainAgents,

Above, and others

Hi

Godaddy does not own bodis, domainagents or above.com

however, they do own, dan, afternic and smartname.



imo...

 

[AmritaB]

You're right, I had assumed some were owned because the staff told me they're basically the same people, but what is more accurate is that Trelian, owning Above shares it's internal databases, which extend into Bodis, etc., there are diffferent company groups but using the same closed database between them. The way the person kind of quietly explained it to me was that they were basically one company.
When I see a company move to only offer Cash Parking, trample the user interface in a particular way, or auto-list to Afternic then to me it is another Godaddy acquisition... they have a very particular development style and design quirks that I recognize after seeing a few companies go through it now that I was using.

Really the end result of operating off of this shared database or office, I don't know the details so much or care to how it is technically implemented, only that in my experience when Godaddy has bought or more quietly partnered with these companies the performance went down the drain.

Again I don't know the exact infrastructure but there is some mechanism in which parking a domain with some particular parking service or brokerage will immediately preclude it from showing up on the MLS sites, so there is some bleed-over to broker performance and status from the parking operation, so in a way they can behave like de facto subsidaries of one another. Of course it is all secretive regarding how it actually works but I did years of testingi and found certain things to be reliablly connected and reliably shown to be on the same subsystem.

 

[Biggie]

I had assumed

there is some mechanism in which parking a domain with some particular parking service or brokerage will immediately preclude it from showing up on the MLS sites,

Hi

all of my domains get parked upon acquisition, and it hasn't had any effect on MLS listings for those names which are enabled for it.
for instance, i had a BIN sale on Sedo, which originated from Namecheap listing and the domain was parked with PPC ads.

imo...

 

[Alex Jones]

Selling domain names can be challenging due to market saturation, subjective valuation, time requirements, competition, legal hurdles, and other challenges. Despite this, success is possible with careful domain selection, realistic pricing, active marketing, and patience.

 

[Cuz]

There are so many new TLDs ti choose from along with less buyers due to China squashing the domain market.

 

[fourex]

.com is still the gold and the oldest extension available

Amen

 

[yphanh2002]

Too many new TLDs is one of the reason I think

 

[onthetopofmygame]

It could also be because most of the Good ones are being listed for more than they are worth, and it is scaring people off.

 

[deo]

This is a great post. Very informative

 

[DTalk]

Quality always sells, in any market......Domains are no different.

If you have quality domains - and tell people about them - you will sell at a given price.

 

[DTalk]

Quality will always sell.