Domaining – Page 6

Is $2000 Too Much To Pay For A Great Startup Domain?

As an example to startups especially, I wanted to highlight this recent auction as an example of the kinds of domains that can be acquired for reasonable prices. If you’re getting ready to launch and are facing the difficult task of finding the right name consider enlisting my help. I know where and how to look for great names at reasonable prices.

I recently participated in a domain auction for the domain Penance.com. I actually have content that matches the domain perfectly. Previously I’ve hosted it on other URLs but I’ve been keeping my eye open for a better one. For my purposes you couldn’t have a better url than Penance.com, and with a ‘category killer’ domain like that it would be much easier to roll out more content in the event the idea started to get traction. But besides my (fun and basically no-profit) idea, Penance.com could make a great domain for all sorts of things (perfume, fashion, feature film title, etc. etc.) so, in my opinion, it would be a smart buy even as an investment- depending on the price.

I hopped in the auction, which was at Sedo. The domain was part of a collection being offered by a single domainer and all the domains were no or low reserve (meaning the owner was prepared to let them go for whatever the market priced them at).

Here’s what happened…

penance-Auction

Penance.com went for $2075, in my opinion a great price. A little over my head but a great deal for the new owner.
If you’re a developer I’m sure you see some obvious and interesting potential for the HockeyScore.com names.
Doodling.com strikes me as a good (not great) branding opportunity for an art related site or blog.
The point is, there are great domains out there for reasonable prices. If you could use a little help finding them, drop me a line.

My Rule Is Something You Can Spell

jason-calacanis-steve-huffman-twist-76 — Jason Calacanis & Steve Huffman

Steve Huffman, co-founder of Reddit and Hipmunk was recently the guest on This Week In Startups with Jason Calacanis. In this audio clip, Steve and Jason share their frustration with acquiring good dot coms and discuss their minimal criteria for choosing a domain. Funny that but for the random passing of a S. American tourist, Reddit might have ended up being called Read.ly or something worse. This is a great episode where Steve tells the story of how Reddit got made, and then sold. He was 22 when he and a co-founder sold Reddit to Conde Naste for a rumored $25M. You can check out the entire episode, with show notes, here.

(Click arrow to play audio clip) Steve Huffman My rule is something you can spell.

@Ev Paid $7500 for Twitter?

Tech Crunch ran a story today about Evan Williams paying $7500 for the Twitter domain name back in mid 2006. Thanks to tweets like these (@ev is the co-founder of Twitter he’s tweeting with Ed Shahzade @ed) people, are finally getting that it’s worth the money to acquire a good domain.

Tech Crunch ran a story today about Evan Williams paying $7500 for the Twitter domain name back in mid 2006. @ev is the co-founder of Twitter. He’s tweeting with Ed Shahzade @ed.

Evan Williams and Ed Shahzade Twitter Domain Thread

And some Twitter history from LA Times.

Then when did the service’s name morph from “Status/Stat.us” to “twittr” to Twitter?

The working name was just “Status” for a while. It actually didn’t have a name. We were trying to name it, and mobile was a big aspect of the product early on … We liked the SMS aspect, and how you could update from anywhere and receive from anywhere.

We wanted to capture that in the name — we wanted to capture that feeling: the physical sensation that you’re buzzing your friend’s pocket. It’s like buzzing all over the world. So we did a bunch of name-storming, and we came up with the word “twitch,” because the phone kind of vibrates when it moves. But “twitch” is not a good product name because it doesn’t bring up the right imagery. So we looked in the dictionary for words around it, and we came across the word “twitter,” and it was just perfect. The definition was “a short burst of inconsequential information,” and “chirps from birds.” And that’s exactly what the product was.

Singular Vs Plural Keyword Domain Names?

Long story short: I personally would develop the variants and have one site be the “money site” and the other sites be doorway or reference sites that link to the money site. 301 redirect makes sense if there is existing traffic but odds are not much so you are better off creating something that is capable of being indexed and ranked.

photo credit: Brett L.

I’ve been asking this whenever I’m around people who might know:

Where you own both… The plural so often makes a better sounding storefront, but the singular keyword often scores 10x or more exact match searches per month. Pointing the singular to the plural with a 301 redirect seems to be the general advice. But that would only generate what little type-in traffic the singular domain got.

In my own experiments I’ve been able to score top 10 in Google for exact match plural keyword search, but disappear off the search results for (much more competition) singular (using 301 redirect approach). Wondering if building out the singular keyword domain could make a difference. But also, don’t want to risk duplicate content penalties.

Probably the best answer I’ve received so far comes from a well known domain developer (whose name I won’t mention because it was in an email and I haven’t asked his permission to quote him) . Would still hope to get a definitive answer with some examples and stats at some point.

Long story short: I personally would develop the variants and have one site be the “money site” and the other sites be doorway or reference sites that link to the money site.

301 redirect makes sense if there is existing traffic but odds are not much so you are better off creating something that is capable of being indexed and ranked.

If you run across any good info please let me know in the comments.
Thanks.

Domains For SEO- Do They Still Matter? Kelvin Newman’s Take

A fun podcast I never miss is the Internet Marketing Insider from SiteVisibility.com. Great insights from the internet marketing trenches featuring Kelvin Newman and Andy White. I borrowed this clip from their recent Want a Sticky Website episode because it deals with a subject I know to be near and dear to domainers. Especially if you’re interested in selling domains to end users for SEO purposes, you need to stay on top of what’s working. I’m not sure I agree with everything Kelvin is saying in this clip, but I’m glad to have his perspective. Check in out.

(Click arrow to play audio clip) Domains-SEO-Micro-Mini-Sites.

Odd Bedfellows

Normalizr Normalizr.com Making Podcasts Sound Good

Normalizr.com Buy It Now Priced at DAN.
How obvious is this? Maybe it’s out there already? Adding it to my bright ideas with a domain name and a Twitter handle list. A cloud based, enterprise level, podcast audio and video normalization and enhancement service.

Optimize your audio or the audio of your video file for volume and balance, i.e. all voices in discussion are at the same volume level.
Optimize your video file for brightness and remove excess camera jitters.

Not rocket science. Scoop up the podcast RSS feed, make it really nice to listen to and watch and re post it to RSS. I think clever programmers could automate this. Hey, are you a clever programmer? This project needs co-founders.

Normalizr

Startup Social Proof Number One – Your Domain Name!

Marco used credit cards to put 30% down on a $36,000 domain name. Financed at 6%, he used Moniker’s escrow service to purchase Thumbtack.com – before he even had a product!

Marco used credit cards to put 30% down on a $36,000 domain name. Financed at 6%, he used Moniker’s escrow service to purchase Thumbtack.com – before he even had a product!
Jason Calacanis tells you why it was a smart move in this discussion with local services hub Thumbtack.com’s Marco Zappacosta.
Excerpt from This Week In Startups #68.
(Click arrow to play audio clip) Domains as Social Proof.

Takeaways: People who know startups know domains well enough to have an idea of what you paid for it.
Save countless dollars and hours in branding/advertising costs by buying an easy-to-remember domain.
Some registrars (In this case Moniker) will finance your domain acquisition. If you’re not getting traction you can default on the purchase and only be out the down payment.

How We Acquired Groupon.com

Mixergy’s Andrew Warner recently interviewed Groupon’s Andrew Mason. This clip discusses how Groupon got Groupon.com.
Full interview with video and transcription can be found at Mixergy.
Andrew calls it ‘the perfect name’, but another fellow with a similar idea already owned Groupon.com. He didn’t want to sell it and he didn’t want to work together. Only later, after obtaining a trademark for ‘Groupon’, which extended to the domain owner’s home country of England, were they able to talk him into selling. Did they pay too much? Andrew doesn’t think so. It helps to remember that Groupon is now doing hundreds of millions in sales annually, but in the interview he states, “We bought it in May of 2009 or something like that, for maybe $250,000 dollars, which seemed like a lot at the time, but now seems cheap.”

(Click arrow to hear clip) How We Acquired Groupon.com

Is a Hyphen Worth $15,000 Dollars

Mixergy’s Andrew Warner recently interviewed Blank-Label.com‘s co-founder Danny Wong. This clip discusses Danny’s frustration with trying to acquire the domain BlankLabel.com
Full interview with video and transcription can be found at Mixergy. [Note: Danny was Skyping in from China so the audio clip is a little funky.]

Danny calls the owner of BlankLabel.com both a ‘squatter’ and an investor. Using the real estate analogy, a squatter would be someone living in a house someone else actually owns. The person who owned the house might be a ‘slum lord’ but nevertheless, anyone can see he’s holding the property as an investment. So sure, in my opinion, the guy who registers Gooogle.com would be a squatter- looking to profit from someone else’s property, but the guy who owns BlankLabel.com (and 29,000 other dot coms) is an investor. The problem seems to be that when people’s passions around building a business are involved, they lose sight of the fact that domain names are simply another product a market grew up around. That some domains are available at registration price somehow allows people to imagine buying the domain they want at that price. Well, you can get a house in Detroit for next to nothing! It might have all the pipes and wiring ripped out, but the city is giving them away in hopes people will move in. That doesn’t make anyone think the house in Beverly Hills should be free does it?

(Click the arrow to hear the clip) Is a Hyphen Worth $15k?

PS $15k seems like a lot, but it’s all relative. IMO it would be worth maxing out a few credit cards or doing another round of friends and family to get the domain.