The domain name Links.com has been listed for sale on the popular website marketplace, Flippa.com. The sale type is “private sale waiting for an acceptable offer” and is listed for a six month term. Links.com is one of the top keyword domains on the net. When I think of the word links, of course, the first thing I think of are the clickable text strings online, but I feel the domain would work just as well as some sort of golf related development project.
Links.com
ICANN Registrar: NETWORK SOLUTIONS, LLC.
Created: 1998-06-20
Expires: 2015-06-19
Updated: 2010-05-04
Claimed Traffic: 14,000 UV’s/month
Alexa Rank: 193,227
Google PR: 4
From the auction description:
Links.com, a domain name that arguably defines the World Wide Web, is a spectacular name for any corporation that is seeking to brand a new product or service with a name that is both instantaneously memorable and so strongly connected with the Internet.
“We have chosen the very popular and highly regarded marketplace, Flippa.com, as our initial platform so that the sale of our super premium domain gets the maximum amount of visibility among our target audience including international corporations, technology startups, brand managers, and worldwide enterprise investors. We feel that the time is right to sell Links.com which can be a superb brand for any organization entering into cloud computing, mobile computing, telecommunications, social-Web services, dating, and many other Internet-based marketplaces.”
Dave Slutzkin, Flippa General Manager, added that “We’re seeing an increasing number of great domains like links.com becoming available on Flippa. This trend is largely due to domain owners choosing to get their assets in front of our highly qualified buyer-audience who are looking to add value to the existing domain.”
It is rare for a short and memorable domain name such as Links.com to come to the market, and expectations are that there will be substantial interest in the name. The values of generic names such as Links.com have been rising dramatically over the last decade as corporations and domain name investors continue to acquire these names for future development opportunities. Recent publicly announced sales of high quality, premium domains include:
Slots.com $5,500,000
Toys.com $5,100,000
Candy.com $3,000,000
Dating.com $1,750,000
Auction.com $1,700,000
Ticket.com $1,525,000
Photo.com $1,250,000
Flying.com $1,100,000
Call.com $1,100,000
Zip.com $1,058,830
Server.com $770,000
Files.com $725,000
Luck.com $675,000
Logo.com $500,000
Talk.com $500,000Reuters recently reported that FB.com sold for $8.5 million to Facebook. Once high quality names are acquired, it is rare for them to ever be available again.
Links.com Website Vital Statistics
Registration Date: 04/01/1993 (Transferred to current registrant in 1996)
Domain Name Characteristics: 5 character, generic, dictionary word
Google Page Rank: 4
Avg. Unique Visitors: 14,000/month
Avg. Page Views: 23,000/monthAny questions concerning this sale should be directed to Links.com/contact
Contact:
Internet Administrator
Links.com
http://Links.com/contact/
* I can confirm that this is a legitimate listing, as Rich, the registrant of Links.com e-mailed me today to let me know about this sale. [Update] Link to official Press Release.
I submitted 15k offer on the flippa, it says, this offer is less than the expected seller’s price.
Why not save the pain , and at least lest what range are you expecting the offer.
Anyhow, thanks for this post Mike:)
This auction will be a great test for flippa to see if they can sell high end names.
@sin – I believe the seller posted the list of generic domain sales in his auction as a guideline to the minimum range at which he will consider selling.
@Brian – I agree, if it can produce a hefty sale for Rich – we’ll probably see more generic domains get listed there since the cost of a listing compared to the cost of premium name brokerage would be much less.
Hope the sale goes well because if done right Flippa could be a place for a END USER and not a regular domainer to buy names for their business.
I wonder what this is going to sell how. Flippa is one HOT place to sell these days
As a decade long domainer I’d like to see that particular name sell and finally change hands, but lets be realistic;
1) The name has been publicly “for sale” for “the right price” since the late 90s. No “right buyers” appeared through the boom in the 90s. No “right buyers” appeared during the unprecedented domain boom that took place a few years ago.
2) The seller isn’t stating any revenue from traffic, casting serious doubt over the convertibility of its traffic.
3) The seller claims to have been in possession of the domain name for 15 years (since 1996). In the span of 15 years (about 3 internet lifetimes) they have not seen any benefit or need to create a compelling website or business on that domain name.
Who knows why the other multi-million dollar domain sales are being cited in the listing. Those names don’t have anything to do with internet hypertext terminology. What those other names have to do with, are multi-billion dollar business verticals.
Hi everyone,
Great comments. Let me try to address some of them:
@sin: Mike is correct in his reply. Domain names like Links.com rarely change hands so it is almost impossible to come up with an asking price or minimum price. I can only point to similar publicly known sales for guidance. If you look at listings for any assets that rarely exchange hands, you will find similar approaches. Thanks for your interest.
@Teendomainer: Hi again! Hope things are going well. Yes, it will be interesting to see what will happen with the listing on Flippa. The positives are that it is an excellent platform for selling domains, has a very large following, and on the first few days it received lots of views and visibility. The downside is that private sales such as mine get almost no visibility once it falls off the first page. This is because the search facility is very weak. I had trouble finding my own listing. This is a major problem since it is rather expensive to keep bumping a listing for $40 a day. Not impossible, but expensive. Hopefully, the listing will go well.
@Mike: Thanks for your comments. I agree completely agree with you.
@business domains: Completely agree. The domain business can be extremely exciting and lucrative if the end-user has a direct conduit to domain owners. Right now there not enough transparency or access. But Flippa has to make it easier for end-users to find their domain of choice. Right now the search facility is inadequate.
@zopp: Yes, Flippa is getting lots of positive publicity. It began with the listing of Dirt.com, followed by Links.com and more recently AY.com. All super premium domains. The challenge now is to raise visibility among end-users. My press release on 24-7pressrelease.com did extremely well and was chosen #5 of all press releases that day which numbered in the thousands. A boom for everyone.
@Marvin: all of your points are very well taken and is a good analysis of the situation. But a little background. Up until recently I had not paid much attention to Links.com since I had a separate career in computer technology. I actually first registered it in 1993 and registered via a transfer in 1996.
I made several attempts to develop the site (some ideas were very good but other sites beat me to it), and I have decided that now is a good time to sell the site. The primary value of the domain name is that it is memorable, receives excellent type in traffic, is applicable and can be branded in many marketplaces, receives excellent SERP, has a very “high quality” connotation to it, (can easily be used by a mobile carrier), etc. However, one might feel about the value of the domain name (the ability for me to find the right buyer will determine this), it is one great name! 🙂 The World Wide Web is fundamentally about links.
Many of the names sited (e.g. zip.com, call.com, files.com) have nothing to do with any vertical though they can be applied to several verticals. And remember that these are only the publicly disclosed sales. I know of others. In conclusion, assets such as this take time to sell. There are many commercial assets on sale for many years before it is sold. I hope that this does not take that long but I am prepared to wait as long as required for what I consider an appropriate offer. Also, this is the first time I have publicly announced that the domain is for sale. Up until now, I did not have any interest in selling the domain.
Hope this addresses some of the questions and comments that were made. I invite any other questions for clarification.
@Rich – The secondary domain market is very efficient right now. All I would say is that if you really are serious about selling the name in 2011 it might be a good idea to put your “appropriate” minimum price on it and let the market decide its true value.
@Marvin Thanks for the comments. I have talked to many brokers and it seems like no one really knows how to price a domain like this. It is more like selling a rare painting than a some real estate. Brokers simply ask me what do I want? What I am doing is looking for some more data points to try to arrive at some target price. The industry is very opaque when it comes to sales of rare domains. Whether or not I actually publish a target price remains to be seen. Sedo, for example, does not publish prices for most of the super premium domains that they are selling nor does BigTicketDomains.