London.co.uk

Look, Simon's sitting on a ton of great geographicals. He could sell a selection of them off and raise a couple of hundred thousand and get a superb main site developed (plus license all the applicable listings, map data etc. which I estimate would cost 25k-50k per year if he's buying it all in from reputable third party sources) and have himself a wonderful core web property potentially worth millions.

Or he can leave everything on PPC parking and pocket a few thousand a month without lifting a finger. That must be tempting too, since the "work/hassle" factor is zero!

 

Nope, it wasn't in the Sedo auction to begin with so it wasn't available for sale at ANY price!

 

agreed.
Good Luck. It is a xxx,xxx low to mid name all day.
Can't help but cringe when think of the millions owner must have lost by not developing over years, buy hey he has so many great names guess he's not losing any sleep as can just sell off or develop at will.

although owner prob always have high natural traffic i imagine, it may get depleted in time by people becoming more and more aware of sites like londontown.com, who incidentally own london.com & point london.com at their site, going for branding over the generic. using the generic for traffic bonus & defensive ownership.
if they have huge deep pockets, which i guess they do, they may just purchase.
either that or perfect for a rival firm to snap up.
there won't be a shortage of buyers that's for sure.

 

Invest in the names, pay top people to develop, then once the money has been spent, and the site runs itself (if developed in the right way) the "work/hassle" zero factor will return again. The difference being for £xxx,xxx a month not £x,xxx.

No brainer! or am I wrong?

Surely now is the time to develop london.co.uk, how many companies out there are going to want to be linked with London, when it comes to the 2012 Olympics. Are they going to want to advertise on a site that has been around for a year or two? full of PPC Ads? Would you?

Of course not. Simon, I do not know you or your company, I wish you every success with this and other names you have in your portfolio, but with Bonfire Night a month a way, I think you should spend some of your budget on a few Rockets

 

Fair Comment.

so, this is rocket science after all:-D

 

agreed, but he hasn't pulled off anything with it in i'm guessing a decade, without checking, so best advice is sell to someone who can. then everyones a winner.

of course, like you say, in an ideal world most people would have developed this baby years ago & would be making money hand over fist monthly.

 

Not a lot of science needed, just some lube! lol

 

Edwin I have to say... I doubt that London.co.uk could make more than £250,000 a year, let alone £1m+ without a rolling six figure marketing budget, or some seriously rare talent.

Ian (Badger) has built several very successful businesses, he really does know his stuff... I am actually pretty surprised that Simon isn't biting his arm off.

 

I don't see why you'd need more than a few grand to kick off the marketing. If the content on the site were compelling and could incorporate goodies not found on other area guides (I have some ideas but they're reserved for my london-england.co.uk domain) to distinguish it from competing sites, then that's probably all that would be required.

After all, the name gets 30,000ish uniques a month now. A modicum of promotion and PR could probably push that up to 100,000+ and things will snowball from there if the site is genuinely "useful" since some percentage of visitors will tell their friends, blog about it, link to it etc. etc.

Plus if the main focus is a business directory, then every one of those 100,000 visitors is advertising the London.co.uk brand as any webmaster checking their stats will see referrals from London.co.uk.

The major cost is the smart platform (clean elegant design, SEOd to the max, with lots of little user-friendly web 2.0-y touches) and the licensing and processing costs for the data you'd need to pre-populate the site listings. Plus authorship costs for custom content about the most important London-related things to see and do to augment the basic listings.

Done properly, there's a MASSIVE credibility gain to be had from the domain name, which will come in handy when trying to negotiate direct deals from sponsors and advertisers...

 

totally agree. how easy when picking up the phone for pr & marketing to say.'it's xxxx from London.co.uk'
sounds great. people will want to be associated with the site too.
as long as it looks different to now

 

Just checked it out...

Looks like London.co.uk is parked at Sedo. Hmmmm

 

All his domains are pointing to Sedo