Make Offer Domain Marketplace Strategy

June 23rd, 2018 Mike

There are numerous strategies and plenty of discussion on whether to list domain names for sale with a BIN price vs make offer or even if it is beneficial to have domains listed for sale at marketplaces or with landing pages at all.

In this post I want to drill down specifically into make offer listings. Many investors choose to have a percentage or all domains in their portfolios listed for sale with “make offer”. It sounds pretty simple, a potential customer lands on a domain or marketplace listing and sees a make offer. As a seller at most marketplaces and landing page templates allow you to set the minimum offer price you’re willing to let potential buyers offer. Setting a minimum offer price helps sellers keep from dealing with constant low offers on liquid or premium domains.

I am curious about strategies used domain owners when setting minimum offer for different types of names in their portfolio or if minimum offers are set the same across a whole portfolio? There are several benefits to setting a lower make offer minimum (under $500) and likely some disadvantages too.

Obvious advantages for domains getting low minimum offers in marketplaces are that at least it shows buyers later on that the domain has received offers previously and is a desirable name. Also, depending on where received an offer usually comes from an identifiable IP address and/or email address which can help the seller figure out who is interested in purchasing the name.

On the flip side, if sellers are expecting at least five figures for a domain, by having a minimum offer of say $10k this will weed out all of the “tire kickers” and give the potential buyer an idea of the sellers expectations. With a background in sales I personally think this gives you less of a chance to pitch and sell the domain to potential buyers that aren’t ready to come to the table with that high of an offer. With a higher minimum offer you may also have it so high that the potential buyer may think that the minimum offer is the sales price and when they finally get the courage to offer that much and get a response that is 5x – 10x on top of that it may discourage them as well. Of course, ultimately the price is the price and eventually the buyer and seller will figure out if the deal is going to happen or not.

What are your thoughts or strategies on setting a low, high or tailored minimum offer for domains in your portfolio?

Brandpa Shares First Year Stats

April 17th, 2018 Mike

Brandpa.com is a brandable domain marketplace that recently completed its first full year selling domains. Similar in operation to BrandBucket, Brandpa accepts domain submissions and if accepted charges the owner to list the domain. Once accepted a domain will be listed in the Brandpa marketplace with a logo and if sold a commission is charged. Many domain investors have seen favorable results from listing on Brandpa, there is a lengthy discussion on NamePros that is a good read for those who may be interested in submitting domains.

During their first year Brandpa claims their sell thru rate is 6.6% with higher conversion rates on names 5 characters or less. Of the domains sold over 50% were with average sale price between $2,000 – $4,000. The total number of domains listed on the platform grew from  779 to 2,674. The marketplace has been growing at a rapid pace, over the last year weekly submissions have gone from only 100 a week to nearly 2,000 a week as of March, 2018. Once submitted, it takes an average of approximately one week to get the domain appraised and accepted or rejected and another (approx) 7 days to get the domain live once the domain name servers have been assigned to Brandpa. See Brandpa’s 1st year blog post for all of the stats shared.

I have not yet submitted any names to Brandpa, although I am encouraged by the feedback from other domain investors and may try it out. My biggest apprehension about using the marketplace are the strict terms of service which demand exclusivity. Even For 30 days after you remove your domain from the site, Brandpa still claim rights to the commission of any sale outside of its marketplace. That being said, it is important to get eyeballs on brandable domains and it seems Brandpa is doing a good job of that.

Thankful For DNW Podcasts

November 23rd, 2017 Mike

Happy Thanksgiving to U.S. domain investors and all that work in this growing industry. Really, I am thankful for every resource and contributor in this space. Elliot at DomainInvesting.com has published several posts this week pointing out many (not all) of the people and companies that really add value to our everyday business.

I have been binge listening to the DNW podcasts lately as my appetite for understanding the entire domain business and not just the investing aspect has grown. So, this is a quick post to thank Andrew Allemann at DomainNameWire.com for continuing to produce a weekly podcast featuring guests from almost every facet of the domain naming industry.

It is no easy task to put together and host a single podcast but to produce one almost every week for the last couple years surely takes a lot of hard work and commitment. Andrew’s passion for domains is evident and the information shared by he and his guests is invaluable. Of course, all of his guests deserve a big thanks as well. Here are a few of my favorites:

Understand Blockchain with Ken Hansen – DNW Podcast #156

Selling a 6 figure domain name – Kate Buckley – DNW Podcast #87

The most successful new domain? with Ken Hansen – DNW Podcast #96

Donuts CEO Paul Stahura – DNW Podcast #58

From zero to a $1 billion with Divyank Turakhia – DNW Podcast #139

Is the eShares rebrand to Carta really a mystery?

November 12th, 2017 Mike

There was an interesting article published on MorganLinton.com Nov. 9th – After raising over $67M eShares fails to secure the .COM and rebrands to Carta. This brought to light for those not involved in the startup community a major rebrand that just happened in that space.

Basically Carta formerly called eShares (using eSharesInc.com) sent out a very candid email to its client base that it has rebranded to Carta, because it does not own eShares.com. There are a lot of comments on the blog post about whether it was a good, bad or just plain stupid idea for this company to not secure the .COM and move the entire brand to Carta.com.

It is an intriguing topic but most of the comments and even opinion shared by Morgan in a follow up blog post There’s a lively discussion happening on my blog about the eShares rebrand seem to ignore the fact that eShares.com is a developed website and it is partnered with Contrib – A Contribution Platform for Digital Assets on the Blockchain. Many of the comments and one that was featured by Morgan are written as if eShares.com is a parked domain and that the owner probably got too greedy watching eSharesInc.com grow over the last couple years. It is also written that Carta FAILED to secure the .COM.

I happen to think that Carta never even had a chance to buy it. Although the domain is under privacy, I am assuming Chad Folkening a top domain investor and well rounded businessman still owns eShares.com and probably didn’t even flinch when/if offers came in from Carta. I was pretty surprised that two blog posts and many comments could be published on this topic as if eShares.com was just an ordinary parked domain owned by an overly greedy domainer. It took me two seconds to make the connection once I visited eShares.com and I recalled some recent publications on TheDomains and DomainNameWire that spoke about eShares and Contrib here and here. Chad explains in an article on TheDomains that there will be a utility token on the Contrib platform called eShares.

I left this information in a brief comment on the “There’s a lively discussion happening on my blog post..” article last night when there were no comments. I went to the article today there is only one comment from Francois of domaining.com so maybe my comment was censored or got trashed by accident? Anyway, I really don’t think it is a mystery at all why Carta had to rebrand. It appears to me that a very well off domain investor has a business plan with this domain and simply did not want to sell.

7 Interesting Nuggets of info from the Verisign Domain Industry Report

September 14th, 2017 Mike

Verisign published its Domain Name Industry Brief today, if you don’t feel like reading all of it below are 7 key takeaways from the briefing. This report is off the heels of the news that .COM just topped 130,000,000 registrations for the first time ever (source).

  • Growth of .com and .net domain names redirecting to social media sites is owned by Instagram, which has seen over 71% increase over Q2 2016. The next highest went to YouTube with 28% increase.
  • Geographical New TLDs registrations have eeked out almost 1% market share of total geographical domain registrations from ccTLD domains.
  • ‘Coin’ was the top trending keyword in .COM and .NET in Q2 2017. Crypto ranked 2nd in .COM and 4th in .NET, respectively.
  • The average sale price for the top 10 .com domain names reported by DNJournal as sold in the aftermarket in Q2 2017 was $917,000.
  • Total ccTLD registrations were 144.2 million in Q2, which is +1.1M or a 0.8 percent increase compared to the first quarter of 2017. ccTLDs increased by approximately 3.7M registrations, or 2.6 percent, year over year (not including .TK which would skew results greatly).
  • The top 10 ccTLDs are .CN, .TK, .DE, .UK, .RU, .NL, .BR, .EU, .AU and .FR. As of June 30, 2017, there were 302 extensions in the root, with the top 10 ccTLDs composing 64.8 percent of all ccTLD registrations.
  • New .com and .net domain name registrations totaled 9.2 million during the second quarter of 2017.
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