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Industry Benchmarks
We also make full use of publicly available metrics, such as overture, Alexa, Marketleap, and so on. Overture is especially helpful when looking at search engine popularity and bid prices. Overture brings up 37 results in the UK for british pub guide, and 323045 for secured loan. As for the Bid Tool at Overture, the highest advertiser’s bid is £3.65 for “secured loan,” and 12p for “british pub guide.” It’s pretty clear that the more search results and higher max bids, the better. In this case, secured loan clearly has a great deal of inherent value, be it via a developed site or a parking page.
Brandability and Commercial Potential
Brandability ties in with both length and memorability. We’re looking for domains that are catchy and could provide ideal as branding opportunities. These factors also link into commercial potential, where we try to gauge where this domain fits into commerce on the internet, and it’s chances in it’s industry to make money. Both domains do well here. “Secured loan” is an often searched term in the Finance field, a field that is quite visible online. “British pub guide” could be classified under a Travel related term, another industry that has an extremely strong online presence.
Related Domains
Not to advertise, but one resource that Sedo has better than most valuation companies is it’s large database of past sales. We draw on not only all of our public past sales, but also all public sales available to us. This really helps us gauge the value of similar domains.
Traffic and Revenue
One of the more prevalent trends that we’ve been seeing is buyers solely looking at traffic and revenue when purchasing domains. Domain speculators are the main culprits here, and we’re seeing a great many mainstream investment companies considering or already having domain holdings. These investors look at the bottom line, and pay based on revenue multipliers. They might range anywhere from 1-5 years for typo domains, to 5-10+ years revenue for good generics. If you want to sell your domain hassle-free, this is obviously the best way to go, as these buyers will go for anything decent as long as it legitimately makes money. This is something we consider as well when making our valuations.
Etc
We also look at variants of the domain, the past history of the page (be it content or ownership history), and potential legal problems among other factors.
This gives you all a rough idea of some of the major factors we look into with regard to domains. This is by no means an exhaustive list, as each domain always presents its own research challenges. We do explore other factors, so if you don’t see something you think is vital in the domain valuation process, more than likely we do look at it as well. We are in the process of looking into way to improve and enhance our appraisal, and I’m hoping that some major changes will be in store somewhere in mid to late 2006.
As for these two domains, I don’t want to come out to exact values as there are owners of each respective domain and they may get offended. So this is by no means an indication of the accurate value, I will say that I feel that britishpubguide.co.uk should be valued at mid-high 4 figures GBP, while securedloan.co.uk should be worth low 5 figures GBP.
Ash Rahimi
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