Health of the Domaining Industry?

[blogbuyer]

Hi All,

I'd like to find out from 'advanced domainers' and their opinion on the health of the domaining markets.

I'm interested to know how the market is being affect with the upcoming .uk domains threatening to come to fruition, exact match domains working less well on Google, SEO being slammed really hard, more TLD's, brokers letting their portfolios drop, so there is more supply etc.

I think it's a 'shrinking economy' that is yet to stabilise.

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Chris

 

[Retired_Member38]

I'm a developer rather than a domainer.

.uk being uncertain is destroying a certain segment of the market. I wouldn't go near an expensive .co.uk that wasn't going to qualify for the .uk under the current proposals. Even buying one that does qualify is a risk as they might change the qualifying rules.

exact match domain benefit being dampened wiped a good slice of value off of domains also. Though its swings and roundabouts as before you might have wanted 'cash loans' and now with the emd benefit hit you go for 'sunny' or 'wonga' or something instead - at least you're still buying.

For me, the worst hit (value wise) are the low to middle end emd's. Moreso when they're on low quality domain extensions.

I've not checked if there are sites on these or who owns them, so apologies if i'm using someone heres domain as an example. Things like:

Flightstolondon.org.uk [flights to london] 5,400
jobsmanchester.net [jobs manchester] 8,100

A few years back you could have bought either of those, thrown a crappy website on it full of affiliate links and then just keep pointing garbage links at it until it ranked. The total cost of the site development & the links wouldn't have exceeded £1000.

Google now only want to rank brands, they are also using far more signals than just how many links you have pointing at you. They're also far more willing to penalise you. So your site built costs probably just went up x10 (or more) to build something penalty proof. Likewise with your link building. Then you need to work out how you're going to get lots of repeat visitors, brand searches etc.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?site...2.2.0....0...1c.1.26.hp..15.2.438.OAaa7D4Mw4k - all either major affiliates or actual airlines ranking.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=jo...1.0....0...1c.1.26.serp..10.5.259.SifXEyokofA - I don't have time to research myjobsmanchester but they're the only one there you could maybe describe as a bit iffy (seems they run a network of 300 similar sites)

Then you've also got the major issue like on the flights one above - Google taking more and more of the traffic for themselves with their own affiliate offerings.

With those 2 example domains there is absolutely no way you could develop and rank them and see a positive roi - the domains are literally worthless (outside of selling them to some other fool on domain lore).

 

[Murray]

though its swings and roundabouts as before you might have wanted 'cash loans' and now with the emd benefit hit you go for 'sunny' or 'wonga' or something instead - at least you're still buying.

Indeed, the decreasing value of EMDs might raise the value of domains you can build a brand on.

Also if dropcatching dries up because of nominet changes, people catching and flipping for cheap will also disappear, potentially replaced by large registry auctions.

Auctions on 123-reg you could see potentially selling for much higher prices than on domainlore just from the sheer amount of extra eyes that would see them.

Because of the above could imagine the price of quality co.uk domains going up.

Of course It will push out all the low level dropcatching/flipping domainers, but the quality portfolio holders will be in an even stronger position.

The past few months might have been a very savvy time to pick up the bargains on domainlore.