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Nice XYZ Sale

Discussion in 'Sold Domains' started by Sound, Dec 22, 2015.

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  1. Sound United Kingdom

    Sound Well-Known Member

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  2. Domain Forum

    Acorn Domains Elite Member

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    IWA Meetup
     
  3. Skinner

    Skinner Well-Known Member

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  4. ian

    ian Well-Known Member

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    Plain and simple
     
  5. BG United Kingdom

    BG Well-Known Member

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    Why is the UK Domain Market so slow compared to the rest of the world

    Personally i don't think its just down to Nominet. I think a major factor is how people sell premium ".co.uk's" domain names for peanuts.

    It's hard to create value when people keep devaluing the market because of the need to sell quick, and i hate to say it but i feel to some degree Acorn has been part of this process.

    At the end of the day we all have different agendas when it comes to domains... Some people hold on to them as investments, some wait for the right buyer to come along and have a price in mind which they are prepared to sell for... and some simply want an instant flip the moment they are caught as they have bills to pay and are happy picking up a name for say £50, to then get returns of £500-£1000+... and nothing is wrong with this but it does effect how the .co.uk market moves forward, as most buyers research comparable sales and try to use those prices to their advantage.

    By now in 2015 you would have expected 3 letter .co.uk's fetching £10k+, and premiums £50k - £100k+, however we've gone backwards over the past 5yrs i feel.

    It would be great if we could get the .co.uk market back on track and create value again, yet doing this will be hard as we all have different business models we work too. And those doing quick flips are making good money and paying the bills, and those buying those quick flips are really happy with the price they are acquiring them for, and obviously those buyers are not going to suggest paying more for them, haha!

    In short we are 'ALL' in control of how the UK domain market is shaped, but it would help massively if Nominet made more of an effort with the way they marketed the extension too - They need to start thinking out the box and create a buzz / value again, rather than de valuing it and confusing people!

    Just my thoughts peeps.

    -Barry
     
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    Last edited: Dec 22, 2015
  6. Skinner

    Skinner Well-Known Member

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    You can't build valuable property on a landfill site.

    Nominet need to stand up, and be heard. However they prefer to fill their own pockets, "diversify" and generally kill their extension.

    If I look at my daily catch rate 2-3 yrs ago, the average mean daily catch were around 80-110 (I posted this a year ago or on the forum), this is pre-.UK. The last 60 days, the average mean daily catch rate is still 80-110. So even now with people doubling up with .co.uk+.UK the average daily catch is SAME as without it. Which I would suggest is actually negative growth or shrinking.

    Edit: average dropping domains per day isn't a good indicator, post-drop day regs over the following week are low double digits per day, 15-25 spread over the following 7 days, you could argue re-regs are 100-130. I don't have the 7 days date from 3 yrs ago to compare. When 2,000+ names per day drop, and 100 are regged, something is wrong.

    The growth rate on each communique is measured in fractions of a percent now.

    It starts with nominet!
     
    Last edited: Dec 22, 2015
  7. invincible

    invincible Well-Known Member

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    Isn't it only certain extensions and being fuelled by Chinese investors, sound?
     
  8. foz

    foz Well-Known Member

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    Nominet made £30K on 9_co_uk ;)
     
  9. invincible

    invincible Well-Known Member

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    How about Nominet send all *.uk domain names being deleted to auction at NameJet or an equivalent first? Any that don't get bid on drop as they currently do. This pushes *.uk extensions out there with the other secondary markets that go to auction houses and enables anyone to bid. It'd be likely that those with the deepest pockets would win the auctions for the better names I'd imagine. I've been suggesting this idea for years. Thoughts? :)
     
  10. invincible

    invincible Well-Known Member

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    Which day? ;-)

    I don't see why this isn't true for any extension. It's supply and demand. If there was the demand from end users we'd see more interest from bigger named speculators, don't you think?

    Some do. I know of a 3 letter that went for five figures but a brand wanted it. The size of the market for 3 letter *.uk is obviously significantly smaller than for 3 letter .com. Many acronyms suffixed with *.uk may have little to almost no potentially obvious end users.

    One other potential issue is bigger brands may be prepared to spend on acquiring the .com at almost "whatever it takes" budgets and when they do they might consider obtaining the .co.uk as a mop up job, only being prepared to pay a low price for it.

    All sorts of domain names sell within .co.uk and for better prices than on here or DL. If you want to find out the kind of prices some well resourced Registrants are asking for, contact one anonymously and ask how much they'll sell "insert one of their better domain *.uk names" for and you might be surprised.
     
  11. 9.xyz for $175,000, what a complete waste of money, this sale makes no sense at all to me unless i'm missing something.

    If i had that kind of money i would to invest it into .com and .co.uk or even look into .co and the cctlds of China and India .in and .cn. Maybe i'm to cynical these days but it wouldn't surprise me if this was a sale fabricated by those looking to profit from smartprice extensions.
     
  12. Sound United Kingdom

    Sound Well-Known Member

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    This should have been done years ago i feel they have missed their chance now.

    They could have made so much money if they had gone down this route
     
  13. Sound United Kingdom

    Sound Well-Known Member

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    Not all admittedly but enough.

    what's amazing is you can sell a five number domain in dot com for $2,000 and its free to reg in .co.,uk
     
  14. spiderspider

    spiderspider Active Member

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    Looks great for the seller :) But just one good sale doesn't make a good extension.



    Wouldn't it be better to start a new thread asking this, rather than confusing a thread about the sale of a .xyz with your nominet marketing research?
     
  15. invincible

    invincible Well-Known Member

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    No. There were two parts to the original post and it's pretty open and shut why 9.xyz sold so high.
     
  16. humble pie United Kingdom

    humble pie Banned

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    How dare you all start slagging off Nominet being culpable, when you know full bloody well they've put Bianca Miller to work behind the scenes..
     
  17. humble pie United Kingdom

    humble pie Banned

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    I hate to partly agree with you :mad: but ironically, if there was more visibility on the drops, thus more bidders on those better names, then the the current 'good names' 'should' go up in value over time. It feels the .com/gtld drop market is a lot more open in general, where as in the UK its generally a much darker, murkey and closed process + it's being cherry picked by a very small handful of people, who, like Bazza says are creating a self fulfilling prophecy of selling names for peanuts to pay gas bills or their monthly catch fee. You could argue any corp or startup looking for a nice LLL finds DL or AD, and thinks in terms of 500 bucks now, not 5k.

     
  18. looks United Kingdom

    looks Active Member

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    Wow, and i voted for this guy, to think, we though we was putting one of us in not a nominet PA system.

    SH
     
  19. invincible

    invincible Well-Known Member

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    I don't know why you'd hate to agree with me. :)

    (the following is from me with my Nominet member/Registrant "hat" on. Nothing to do with me being a NED):

    There are portfolio holders with substantially attractive portfolios that don't participate on forums and are likely successful businesses doing what they do, not just doing it to pay the gas bill.

    As an example I don't see GIRAFFE or 3DWEB openly participating on this forum and never remember seeing either doing so. I've picked on those two portfolio holders but I could name several others. Unless one monitors their portfolios one won't know how often they make sales. Since these type of Registrant don't appear to publish their sales we can't deduce how profitable they are or how they price their domain names. One could inquire anonymously and find out, I suppose. For all I know these kind of registrant might not need to sell more than one or two domain names a year to keep everything ticking along nicely. It seems likely that they are successful given they're still maintaining their portfolios.

    Unfortunately portfolio holders that keeping their sales to themselves don't generate positive publicity for the relatively small marketplace.

    DomainLore is one obvious vehicle for publically advertising the sale of inventory however I can't believe it has the kind of reach that bigger registrars that advertised secondary market domain names in their search results would or perhaps as much as other auction sites such as NameJet.com do.

    Would expiring names regularly appearing on a marketplace such as NameJet.com sent there by Nominet, the registry, generate more eyeballs and result in higher value sales than the existing marketplaces?

    While there is nothing inherantly wrong with anyone selling domain names for apparently peanuts because those domain names will likely be acquired by other speculators who are happy to pay these "peanuts" prices before putting the domain name into their private collection to await any eventual inbound end user inquiries.

    I suppose the only fault with it is end users might see DomainLore prices and think those are the norm before being surprised or shocked by the price a portfolio registrant might ask for.

    That part of the process could be circumvented by Nominet auctioning the expired domain names directly on a more prominent marketplace. I suspect many of the same portfolio holders, and well known buyers, would bid in these auctions and probably end up acquiring many of the domain names anyway. Whether they would end up paying more to do so than they do now I am not sure.

    By keeping aftermarket sales more out of the mainstream it seems more likely that prices would remain low but I don't know the makeup of the DomainLore bidder database to comment about how non-mainstream its user base is!

    In respect of the price of three letters, should "xqu" (I made that one up because it features apparently less desirable letters) be worth any more than £500 in *.uk? Would we realistically see it as an end user domain name? It's not "fix" or "amp" or "air" or "abc". I realise these sort of domain names are worth much more in .com and in .cn but there are reasons for that and those same reasons do not currently apply to *.uk domain names (it would be great if they did!).
     
  20. ian

    ian Well-Known Member

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    That includes you though right? I'm not aware of you actively confirming how many sales or how much those sales were for? Not saying that is wrong, but obviously goes against your own position that it may not be the best for the marketplace. It is a tricky one though, for some, keeping it private is important to their own business model, whilst others (using Denys as an example, hope he doesn't mind), displays his sale prices on his website, possibly as a way of guiding potential buyers on price expectations, but possibly also to keep the time wasters away.

    Just in general (not specific to you David, you didn't say it), I don't feel it is fair to assume that anyone simply flipping domains for peanuts are doing so in a desperate need to pay their bills and keep a roof over their head; we all have our own approaches. I've taken a position from the start (as I publicly stated I'm not a fan of holding large portfolios of "domains with potential" on landing pages) of selling on to trusted buyers and in some cases, end-users (if the time-scale allows). In some ways to ensure a quick healthy turnover, in others because of ease of sale (some end-user sales can be time consuming educating the uneducated), and mainly because I like to keep moving on and learning. A big part of that decision was also because I wasn't sure where the .uk market would lead us, up or down, and took a position that it was likely to be down as more cash flows towards .com's - would I reverse some of the sales I made if I could, yes, I've sold around 60 lll's in 18 months, some I'd love back but are now gone - I can see that the market may now have bottomed out, but that is purely through own research, nothing more solid.

    Fun game either way!
     
    Last edited: Dec 22, 2015
  21. invincible

    invincible Well-Known Member

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    Yes, although on some occasions I couldn't give out the price.

    That's true.

    Thank you for reminding me.

    Not all I am sure. :)

    How would you react to a hypothetical auctioning off of expired domain names by the registry before the remainder without bids dropped as usual? Would you become a bidder?
     
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