Wanted: Domain Appraisal General domain pricing question

[expertc]

Hi,

I didn’t know were to put this question so came to this section.

The thing is: a friend of mine was contracted to develop a community portal. Project didn’t go through so we were discussing it with him. He is not into domains (coder) and told me about the suggested domain. It was .org.uk but,
It is a LLL pronounceable word, listed in Encarta Dictionary with around 250000 exact matches (Google – UK) and 13,000,000 exact matches (Google – Global) and it is not a trademark. Sorry, I can’t reveal the name, because I immediately bought it for one Project and unfinished Project domains are under confidentiality (yes, I’ve got his permission to register it). All TLDs (com, net, org, biz, es, de, cc, ws, you name it! are long gone).

What do you think could be it's bare bone value? Any thoughts? And how it went unnoticed for such a long time?

 

[accelerator]

lll in the .co.uk tend to go for £500+, but in the .org.uk it's likely to be less than that. I don't think three letter .org.uk are particularly valuable, take a look at domainprices.co.uk to find comparisons.

Rgds

 

[DomainM]

The .org.uk domain suits the community nature of your project, however generally there's little value in LLL.org.uk domains.

Overall LLL domain values are now fulling even the stable .com values have dropped over the last few months. LLL domains are not what they once were.

 

[RampageJackson]

The .org.uk domain suits the community nature of your project

I don't agree.

The only thing .org.uk are good for is purely SEO plays, when you are trying to rank the site and get clickthroughs from the search results. They are completely worthless for anything of a community nature, as most people don't even know .org.uk is a domain extension - they are going to get mixed up with .org and .co.uk and end up on the wrong sites.

If a .org.uk is an exact match of well searched, monetizable phrase then its worth something. Everything else is a waste of everyones time.

From the general publics point of view, can anyone really think of any big sites that are on .org.uk's? I can't.

 

[rush]

Plenty of big charities, galleries/museums, trade bodies/associations, community websites etc are all on .org.uk, lends trust & authority to a site, I think the extension is more widely known by the general public than you think.

 

[DomainM]

Good points RampageJackson, I've never spent much time on .org.uk domains

 

[RampageJackson]

Plenty of big charities, galleries/museums, trade bodies/associations, community websites etc are all on .org.uk, lends trust & authority to a site, I think the extension is more widely known by the general public than you think.

Galleries/museums or not widely known, neither are trade bodies. Charities, I'll give you that one.

I don't agree that it lends trust an authority to a site - to people in the know it looks like you just couldn't afford the domain you really wanted.

I just think you lose far too much typein traffic to do anything truely brandable with a .org.uk. I'm working on a big .org.uk right now, but purely for the seo benefit of ranking it - I realise it will never be brandable.

 

[dashu1]

I don't agree that it lends trust an authority to a site - to people in the know it looks like you just couldn't afford the domain you really wanted.

"People in the know" are not the target market though are they?

The general public wouldn't have the foggiest.

 

[RampageJackson]

And its those people who "wouldn't have the foggiest" who are going to repeatedly forget the extension and give their money to your competitors on the .co.uk and .org.

 

[retired_member6]

There's a lot of rubbish being said about .org.uk in this thread. Rampant you always look at your own purposes and not that of others, think out of the box, as stated associations, charities and the like love a org.uk and so do most companies who find the .co.uk taken or too expensive, even a merchant has gone with a .uk.com for their trading domain on one network today and it will never be theirs, so to speak.

Three letter .org.uk do resell but much more difficult, right end user over £1000, but right end user, also most trusts and associations need board clearance for purchases so if asking too much, you may have to wait a few weeks to a month for board approval / acceptance / response. Search engines aint the be all and end all, they're one particular avenue.

 

[SF]

I take it someone has the co.uk then!

I would stay clear of org.uk "dont believe the hype"

 

[RampageJackson]

Thanks, you're proving my point - they are for people who can't afford the real extensions - and I include myself in the expensive .org.uk I am developing right now.

They are worthless outwith charities and purely seo plays.

You can say what you like about org.uk's, but its hard to deny the fact that you are going to lose a lot of your typein traffic to competitors on the .org and .co.uk. Unless you are buying a .org.uk purely for the seo benefit of an exact match domain, why put yourself at a disadvantage before you start?

If someone mistypes a url while looking for Oxfam its no big deal, they'll hit the back button and they'll find what they are looking for. If they mistype your productname.org.uk and land on the .co.uk selling the same thing, cheerio affiliate payment.

How many people here do you think are building charity sites, and how many do you think are building affiliate sites?

I realise asking a domain seller to agree that a domain is pretty much worthless is like asking Turkeys to vote for Christmas, so with that I'm out of this thread

 

[retired_member6]

How many people here do you think are building charity sites, and how many do you think are building affiliate sites?

At least you're proving one point, selling domains on here at reseller prices is silly, due to a lot being developers so should be treated as end users.

 

[RampageJackson]

Great, I answered the question nobody was asking.

 

[retired_member13]

Let's be realistic about this.

In the US there is a lot of talk of the minimum "wholesale" value of the different classes of short domains - ie the value that a domain that has those characteristics could be sold for, regardless of the letters or numbers they contain. This value is a completely different measure to what the best examples might be worth to the right buyer.

The wholesale value of LLL.co.uk at present appears to be around £300 - as in you don't really see them going for less than that on any marketplace regardless of quality or lack of it.

The minimum wholesale value of LLL.org.uk is well below the cost of the registration fee. Even the most optimistic resellers do not think that they are worth registering - therefore as an investment class they are worthless in today's marketplace.

Proof of this?

Out of possible 17,576 LLL.org.uk combinations, 7,530 were unregistered as of circa 12am this morning.

IMO, anyone who strongly disagrees with the above assessment of their value would be best off taking the list of available LLL.org.uks and registering them - I'm more than happy to email you the list if you don't have DAC access etc.

I think this also says a lot about the relative value of org.uk versus co.uk. If org.uk were really 5%-10% of the value of the equivalent .co.uk, then these unregistered domains would be worth £15-£30 each, representing a profit of between £75,000 - £190,000 on the registration fee.

Any opinions?

 

[RampageJackson]

Sensible post Ty_.

But the fact is, nobody wants to admit they wasted their money. They don't want to admit their domains are garbage.

Almost all people posting a thread saying "tell me how much this site/domain is worth", really mean "tell me how great I am" rather than wanting an actual genuine appraisal.

 

[retired_member12]

Proof of this?

Out of possible 17,576 LLL.org.uk combinations, 7,530 were unregistered as of circa 12am this morning.

IMO, anyone who strongly disagrees with the above assessment of their value would be best off taking the list of available LLL.org.uks and registering them - I'm more than happy to email you the list if you don't have DAC access etc.

You have completely over simplified that arguement. Most people 'in the know' know that the vast majority on the LLL .org.uk' s that remain unregistered are of the zxj, qqx variety. That is why they remain unregistered. To use your arguement, then sex .org.uk wasn't worth registering.

I suspect you'll find that a lot of the LLL .org.uk's, which are worth something on a lower % parallel with the .co.uk versions, are registered to domainers too!

Sensible post Ty_.

But the fact is, nobody wants to admit they wasted their money. They don't want to admit their domains are garbage.

Almost all people posting a thread saying "tell me how much this site/domain is worth", really mean "tell me how great I am" rather than wanting an actual genuine appraisal.

What is value? Well, if you use them purely for seo purposes, then that's still value to my mind, surely? Otherwise, why bother doing the seo?

 

[RampageJackson]

Yes but most of the junk domains don't match up with a word with any search volume, making them worthless. Domains like creditcards.org.uk etc have massive value.

A domain that doesn't match up with search volume in a .co.uk is brandable and worth something - the same word is almost always worthless as a .org.uk, imo

 

[retired_member13]

Most people 'in the know' know that the vast majority on the LLL .org.uk' s that remain unregistered are of the zxj, qqx variety. That is why they remain unregistered. To use your arguement, then sex .org.uk wasn't worth registering.

I think you missed the point completely.

I didn't say that specific LLL.org.uk don't or can't have value, I said that LLL.org.uk does not have value as a generalised class of domain investment.

Your own quoted examples, zxj & qqx etc would be worth circa £300 each in the .co.uk extension, but nothing in .org.uk. I don't personally think that they're worth anything even in .co.uk, but the market disagrees, and it is the market that I was discussing, not my own personal opinions of the trends it creates. Of the 7,500 LLL.org.uk I found I actually liked 2 of them enough to register before posting the above ;-)

As it happens, one company (Giraffe) did exactly what I suggested in the .co.uk space in late 1999 when they registered all 8,000+ available LLL.co.uk over a 2 week period.

At the time those domains were not considered worth the registration fee either.

Investing in a market is ultimately down to your own personal opinion of what the market is going to do and where currently there are opportunities. Anyone seeing opportunities in org.uk should be registering them.

 

[grantw]

I'm not sure how many I've got but I've certainly sold enough lll.org.uk domains in the £300 to £500 range to allow me to sit on the rest for a good few years.

Grant