Getting The Name that Got Away - Pursuing Expired Domain Names for Profit and Pleasure
From making a financial investment on an online commodity to getting a second
chance at the one that got away, expired domain names have created a new market
that has proved to be both lucrative and frustrating.
During the dotcom registration boom, investors cast their nets on the ocean of
domain names, pulling in the ones that they perceived would be in demand. As a
result, entities who were looking for the ideal domain name they wanted for
their site found that someone else had beat them to it, and they either had to
deal with the registered owner or settle for their second choice.
Fast forward to almost a decade later. Quite a few of those who bought domain
names by the dozen have either gone bankrupt, closed down or lost interest. But,
while it may now be possible for you to have that domain name you had always
wished for, you may need to look twice before actually getting it.
What do people look for in expiring domain names? Whether for the purpose of
ownership or investment the following criteria appear to be common:
1. Free Traffic - Some expired highly valuable domains already have a huge
amount of traffic running through it on a regular basis. These domains are
already listed in the Yahoo and DMOZ directories and have good search engine
rankings. Now that domains such as these are expiring, it can bring in all the
traffic that used to flow into the old site into the new one.
2. Relevance/Saleability - Domain names that are appropriate for either the
entity or its target audience, or keywords from their particular industry.
Domains such as AllStarTelephone.com or AsiaCommercePortal.com are expiring and
should be up for grabs by entities on the lookout for similar domains. Domain
names such as these have a ready market waiting for them and buyers may already
be at the threshold of sites such as Pool.com or SnapNames.com
3. SEO-ablity - A domain name no matter how appropriate or catchy it may be is
useless if it has been used as a spam site and consequently banned by search
engines. The expiring domain name must be usable. To determine this, a certain
amount of research must be done by the prospective buyer, looking up the
previous owner and whatever content the domain name used to display. A good tool
for this would be the Wayback Machine,
which holds cached pages of what some websites looked like to as far back as
1996.
4. Price - research into domain sales markets such as Sedo.com or Afternic will
give a domain buyer insight on how much an expiring domain is good for. Rule of
thumb is to not spend more than the current value of an expiring domain. While
there is the possibility of a domain worth US$10 today will be worth $10,000 two
years from now, nothing short of clairvoyance on your part will guarantee it.
While there are domain name investors who buy expiring domains for the purpose
of re-selling them, some individuals -- like media professional Mike Davidson,
President and CEO of NewsVine.com -- have placed back orders for domain names
that their business can use. Mike himself tells the story of how he made a bid
for the domain name NewsVine.com two years ago, on his blog with his post
"How to Snatch an Expiring Domain."
The homepage of Pool.com carries lists 10 out of more than 42,000 expiring
domains as of this writing. Enom.com lists
dropped names on a page accessible from one of its drop-down menus. SnapNames.com lists expiring domains on its homepage as well, on the lower half
of the page.
In his post, Mike relates his almost cloak-and-dagger experience with the three
domain snatching firms mentioned above, at one point bringing himself to
wondering if he was actually bidding against himself for the domain name he was
pursuing. In the end, he relates, the value of an expiring domain name is solely
dependent on how much you really want it.
