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  • Algis 11:05 on March 27, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: algis skara, , ethics,   

    Domain ethics (with my own example) 

    Important as it may be. This is one of the key factors for other businesses to consider liquidity of domain market. We are not talking about scumbags and liars, we are talking about what is OK, and what is not.

    Of course most of people had experience buying something that was advertised with very different numbers prior to the purchase when compared to what it actually was earning. That is of course if you are buying domains only based on revenue. And while some names revenue is important, you should not be basing your decisions of buying domain names only on revenue numbers, which can be misleading.

    I want to talk about real ethics. I will explain what I mean on my own experience. Few years ago I registered typo of a generic domain name. There was a project running on plural version of the domain, and I had single version. It was nothing special until plural version started something, which brought 1,000 visitors a day to my domain. That was converting to around $20-30/day. So I decided to research a bit and found out that they were running some major advertising deal with a very big website. Then I decided that it might be a good time to sell it.

    So I posted it for sale and had few interested parties interested in 30x/month range. And one person offering me 36 months based on $30 per day revenue. 32k in other words.

    And I was like. Let’s research once again to be sure I am not selling cheap. So I did. And found out that this major deal between those websites will run for 4 more weeks. And then it will be over.

    Now how many of you would try to sell quick?

    I decided not to sell. I imagined myself on buyers place. And while it would have been his fault of not doing enough due diligence, I still should be responsible. So yes, in 4 weeks traffic went down to 20 per day. And now that plural version is not even responding.

    I never said that potential buyer what he avoided. I just said it was no longer for sale.

    It did cost me $32k.

    Share your story or thoughts on this matter.

     

    • M M 14:53 on March 27, 2012 Permalink

      I agree 100% with the ethic part, I would have done the same thing.
      but I don’t understand the ‘no longer for sale’ answer.
      Instead of shutting the door in your both faces, I would have share this info with the buyer and let him/her to decide.
      You never know other people motives and maybe you missed a good opportunity to sell this domain for a nice amount of money (even if not 32k)…

    • Puranjay 16:55 on March 27, 2012 Permalink

      You’re a good guy Algis but unfortunately, few people would do what you did (even though I wish it were otherwise).

      I’ve never been in such a situation before, but once I bought a domain from DNF for around $15k. Later, that same domain was put up for auction at Sedo and fetched $12.5k. The buyer was from DNF as well and he appreciated that I didn’t sabotage the sale for what was a publicly known loss.

      Another time, early in my career, I bought a domain off someone for $18k. The only problem was that I had $14k with me at that time and couldn’t spare the extra $4k. I promised to give him $14k and the rest within a week. He was skeptical but agreed. We didn’t sign any agreement or contract – just our words. A week later, when I sent him his $4k, he was really pleased and said that people who are that honest are hard to find. He also offered to write me a referral whenever I needed. I still have that email and it makes me feel good to know that someone thought of me that way.

  • Algis 11:26 on March 23, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: appraisals, , meter, , success, valuate   

    Domain name success meter instead of valuation 

    So here are some thoughts, which I hope will turn into a healthy discussion about this very important subject on our way to domain liquidity.

    So what do we have now. We have some massive automatic appraisal thing going on. Everyone know about it’s quality. The only way we can/should use that is to extract decent names from a huge list. That’s it. They report wrong seo volumes, wrong advertisers, etc. And numbers are off.

    So here is my look on this. No matter what domain name have the amount of people interested in it(if at least one person is interested).

    What are the crucial metrics to a domain name and which of them are more important then the others?

    Here is my list

    Domain name must be .com (for a very obvious reason, .com is the best and got traffic leaks from any other extensions + type-in traffic)

    Search volume for the exact keywords (small addition, there is a big difference in 500,000 exact searches for “.psd tutorials” and 12,000 searches for “consolidate loans”). Every single domain approach should be different.

    Type-in traffic. (yes, it is nice. however when you are using short .com’s you are not getting targeted visitors – no matter what sellers say. If you are looking to buy irons.com – that small amount of type-in traffic will not be the irons you think they are. They will be golf irons, steam irons, electric irons, some music band named irons, someones dog named irons, someones school project and they check for domain name. Yes they will be all checking up irons.com and NO you will not get convertions from that traffic. Ok, maybe you might get 1% convertion).

    Another important metric is would you buy this domain for more. (If for example I buy a domain interiordesignideas.com – which is my domain for 9k. I need to know, is it really possible to get more for it. Would the price that I ask be a fair price for someone else. Would I be able to unload it at the same price if I get no success in reselling at a higher price? This is very important).

    Product domain name. (When I say product I don’t mean only domain like pearlearrings.com, newyorkshows.com is a product, memorycards.com is a product, familyvacation.com is a product. Something that can be branded and become a point of sale is a product. And what is not a product. Domains like others.com, unsure.com etc. can be a product in your head, with your plan – but so can be any other domain name).

    Unique position of a domain name to competitive domain name. (Recently I inquired about RefinancingLoan.com after finding an email in 2007 that I sent to them and they reply back then was: we will email all interested parties and sell to highest offer. So I check whois and it was still the same owner. Then I sent email asking how much they want for it. And he said: six figures. So I replied: “lol”. And he replied: “personalloans.com sold for 1mm”. And I replied: “but you are not selling it, you sell something very different”.  Can you really compare apples to black caviar. No, you can’t. Even if there are more buyers for apples, you can unload rare sort of caviar for much much more. And If you are selling apples there are tons of different sorts. So you better have the best one. But it’s a totally different market. So refinancingloan.com, I would consider all these before: refinanceloans.com, refinanceloan.com, loanrefinance.com, refinancing.com, loanrefinancing.com. In this case for the buyer it would have been much better to just buy something like refinancemyloans.com or refinancingmyloan.com – as you see there are no similar approach).

    Domain name length and age of registration. (Yes, I combine them. Both of them are important, none of them is super important. I did sell roleplayinggames.com and refinancemortgagerates.com for very good amounts, while some short domain names didn’t sell nowhere near).

    Advertisers. (Yes, they are important. You can get direct ad proposals from them, you can get their targeted ads via adsense on your website that pay higher, you can sell your domain/website to them – so what you want is more of them and the higher they pay per click – the better).

    If it is a product domain name, are people actually buying it on the net. (Sometimes I see very strange bids on auction. People are buying well known product domain. But they don’t make sense. You can’t build a store for something people are used to buy together with their groceries. When you are trying to buy a product name. Think. Would you buy it over internet yourself. Ask your friends would they do that?)

    So now when we have all the metrics, how should we use it. Let’s take a domain name for example. Flippa.com did mention my previous post in their blog. So let’s take one of the domains listed in their marketplace.

    Fitness.com – price tag = 4 million dollars. So yes, it is a great name. Everyone would love it. Bla bla bla bla. Citing the seller revenue is: “Our monthly revenue is between 12,000 – 18,000 USD“. Then seller adds in comments “If you are looking to just take what we’ve built and try to make money on the site, than this domain is not for you. If you have a good business model that could benefit from 3m visitors / month, than this is more up your alley.

    For example, a standard conversion rate is 2% … 2% of 3m = 60,000 clients / month. If those 60,000 clients bought something with a profit margin of $10, that’s $600,000 / month.”

    Right. Now let’s have some analysis. You had this domain since 2004. You tried hard and you could only make it earn 12,000 per month in 8 years of work. It is either you are very bad or the business model was not viable at all. And you are trying to sell it based on what some other mythical person could do with website, so it will earn 30x times more then you did, but based on revenue you are asking 27 years of revenue IF revenue will remain at 12k and will not drop.

    I understand our example is not pure domain name and we can’t really look at metrics and be objective. So we just try to use the success meter here.

    What would be comfortable number for us to pay for it. I would say 60 months of revenue. Because no matter how good it is, there is no guarantee it will make more then 12k. So we need a point where we can sell it for more. We don’t just buy something and keep it. We want to make profit, right. And we only want lower revenue amount, we don’t know and can’t be sure it will make 12k in future, let alone 18k, so why use any averages.

    So at 12k that’s 720k dollars. Very fair amount to me. Fitness is great generic domain. But you need GREAT website, team, supply and great contract with a shipping company for it to become GREAT fitness related products to sell. Yes there will be a small % of people who will buy on this website without comparing to others, but to be industry leading store you will have to be more then just that.

    So at 720k dollar I would put our success meter at 100%. Because dependance on can we sell it for more or not is based on what we put in it, how much work and money we invest. So if we are successful and make 2x then it was. Then our success meter doubles to 200%. Everything that we sell about 100% is a pure profit.

    Now if it drops, we lose money. No need to explain. We might find someone stupid who will pay what we paid or even more without any business plans. Fitness.com WOW. But we definitely can’t rely on that.

    Simple yes. But here is why it can be a good model to appraise domain names.
    We can buy fitness.com for 360k for example. That’s 200% success meter. Much better deal isn’t it. We can always try and sell for 100% and get that profit.

    We can also buy for 1,440,000 at 50% and hope to sometimes get to 100%.

    Now the number of revenue months and other factors should be based on the metrics. If it was fitnessstore.com then we would have many domains better then it. And success meter would have go down based on that etc.

    I am not offering anything 100% solid, otherwise I would have built a website. I am just saying this system can be implemented for easier tracking of ROI. You only need to think about all metrics once, determine the 100% success meter price. And then you know is you having a good or bad deal.

    Hopefully we can discuss about this matter below.

     

     

    • Domain Magazine .Net 06:20 on March 24, 2012 Permalink

      Great article!
      How about Cost Per Click (CPC) or advertising cost for the domain keyword?I think its very important to value a domain.
      and how to value a short brandale domain: flippa, zynga, etc?

    • Danny 22:35 on March 24, 2012 Permalink

      Great points – there are deals to be had for people who can do the analysis correctly. But the problem with online business in general, is that it’s changing so quickly. A site or domain that was generating $10k a month last year, could suddenly have lost favor – either from the search engines, or changes how browsers operate – and could have their traffic quickly disappear.

    • Adam 21:21 on March 27, 2012 Permalink

      Algis, something additional to think about . . .as a business gains customers, those customers become worth more than the original sale. 60,000 clients / month as in your example could also mean the next month or even 6 months later that those customers come back again and buy more (depending on what your selling). It’s a multiplying effect. You have to think of the lifetime value of owning a customer as well. You can market to those people and sell them more. Now that you “own” that customer you have the ability to make more money. I know many businesses that pay much more than their profit on the first sale to acquire a customer for life, because they know what the lifetime value of a customer is to them.

      Laslty, a brand that picks up a great domain like fitness likely can leverage the branding potential of the name which has a totally different “meter” that is not easily calculated.

  • Algis 14:05 on March 20, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: answers, , forums, hopefully,   

    Tales of the past. Domain forums 

    Hey there, so here’s a little story based on real life. My life. I got in domaining back in 2007. For veterans it is much past the “get your domains cheap and become rich” deadline. So yes, I got to domaining with the launch of .eu domains and registered lots of stupid crappy domains. Oh, forgot to add. I got in domaining in 2007 AND I had $2,000.

    So after a few weeks of listing crap domains for $200,000 on ebay and having some fun with that I started to get worry. Like, come on, I spent $1k – give me some $100k profit. Why is nobody buying my crappy domains that don’t make sense even to myself if I look back at those domains.

    Then I decided to actually get some knowledge. So I went to find some useful resources. Google’d that. Found some domain forums. namepros and dnforum. Still couldn’t figure out why something is good and something not so good. Well, of course obvious domains like cars.com are good no matter if you have domaining knowledge or not. But I could not understand if interiordesignideas.com was reg fee domain or was it xx,xxx.

    As you may imagine it took me some time to get that information right. During my first year I managed to sell few of the .eu domains. Poor guys who purchased them, they had less idea about the business then I did. And I was ready to start with the main focus(which remains main focus today as well) – generic .com’s

    And I can tell you that back then in 2007-2008 domain forums were a crowded place. Probably they are crowded now as well, but back then they were crowded with people who actually make xx,xxx and bigger sales happening. You could have bought decent names, you could have found deals in “domains wanted” and actually sell something you own for x,xxx to xx,xxx.

    Yes, you can still do it now if you have amazing domain and you want to unload it for cheap. The problem is, people on domain forums nowadays only want to buy good generic names for super cheap. Is it another generation of domainers that don’t want to make mistakes and just trying to buy very cheap to make profit. Or most of forum domainers or so called resellers are tired of multiple domain newbies sending them PMs with crappy domains for xx,xxx+ price tags.

    I am not sure, but I can tell you one thing. Domain forums are VERY unfriendly to new domainers at this time.

    • New people can’t really find the proper information on entering the business.
    • Domain buyers on forums are mostly looking to buy good generic .com’s with 5,000+ searches for under $1k.
    • You can’t really sell as well. I tried to list numerous high quality domain names(which I later sold for higher amounts) on forum and I had like 400 views and 0 action.
    • Lots of people try to trick or blatantly rip you off selling you low value domain names 10-25x higher they their price.
    • Domain market is not a liquid market. Therefore even with a good domains you need rich buyers. And in domain forums that is not an option. Or you will be ripped of by those buyers to sell domain for 1/4 of it’s price.
    • Too many nonsense and negative information floating around forums. More educated domain owners trolling less educated ones etc.

    So the question are:

    What do we need to take the industry to the next level?

    What do we need to create to make domain business closer to the liquid market?

    How can we provide an objective view on the market?

    Should we pay attention to the people who regged xx,xxx+ domains for reg fee back in 2000 or earlier at all?

    Would they achieve any success in today’s domain market?

    And lastly, should we even spend time going to domain forums today?

     

    • Gene 15:32 on March 20, 2012 Permalink

      I largely agree with the points that you’ve made – nice to see that not every article is from one domainer praising another colleague.

      To your question about how to take the industry to the next level, there’s a noticable absence of leadership from the top on doing just that.

      Last year, I called for the industry to think more strategically in my white paper that was published on DomainSherpa.com (http://www.domainsherpa.com/domain-name-standard-value-proposition/ ).

    • Michael 16:14 on March 20, 2012 Permalink

      Good article. I agree with all points at the bottom except for the first. “New people can’t really find the proper information on entering the business”. This is true to an extent, however, if you visit DNF College on DNForum(dot)com, Adam Dicker set up a pretty nice archive of information to pull from. My BEST advice to ANY new domainer, or someone who has been in the game a year or two and not making profit- read Morgan Linton’s blog! Go back a year or so and read EVERY article you can. Some bloggers like Morgan are EXTREMELY helpful and will answer an email if you send it, guarenteed. There are many other helpful domainers, but I must say- Morgan’s blog has been the most informative for me. Noobs- MorganLinton(dot)com- I’m telling you…. This article was great and the guys at the top need to step their game up and really draw some attention and recognition to our industry instead of complaining that their daily profits went from xx,xxx to x,xxx or that they have Insurance.com for sale for $178,987,444.63

      -MH

    • new domainer 16:22 on March 20, 2012 Permalink

      Hi
      don’t worry -> at the beginning I bought like hundreds of crappy .us’s from Aussies who charged me EUR59 (which is around USD70) for each crappy .us domain!!! Total rip off. So as a beginner when I had no idea .us’s were worth shit, ended up like almost USD50k behind
      But strangelly those guys are still in business at europeregistry.com :(

    • Ron 18:46 on March 20, 2012 Permalink

      I agree with the points you make… domaining is not that great for the new investor (esp. one with a limited budget). I’ve been on forums, dealt with brokers, and also some of the ‘helpful’ bloggers. Domain forums are filled with people with a dog eat dog mentality (at least in my opinion).

      Coming from corporate America, I do not see most of these people surviving in a real industry. It is an extremely unprofessional atmosphere, and yes there are trolls. Adam dicker is very helpful, but he is also raking it in with the products he promotes to his dnf college crowd. Elliot Silver seems like another helpful domainer. Oh and the brokers that have an email list think they are great brokers, when they will only take on super premium names for low prices that anyone could sell in their sleep.

    • owen frager 19:49 on March 20, 2012 Permalink

      The door closed on domaining in 1999, then had a brief opening between 2001-2005. Anyone who came in after that should just pack it up and go home and stop making ICANN, GoDaddy, Estibot, Domain Tools, eBooks, Sedo, Afternic etc and all the other scam artists that prey on you rich enough so they don’t have to care about the customer’s they were given licenses to serve- real end users who need domains and domain protections for real business applications. But you won;t have to worry three months from now the government will becoming in and cleaning all that up for you. If you can’t afford a lawyer you are wasting good money and time when their are stocks and short sale housing that can make you millionaires instead. Right Louise- hows tat 3D working out for you?

    • Derek 00:07 on March 21, 2012 Permalink

      Great post! Agree with pretty much all of it. The atmosphere has changed from when I entered the game in 2007. More get rich quick types floating around. I spend very little time on the public forums anymore, but can definitely say they are where I got my domain education.

    • Algis 11:08 on March 21, 2012 Permalink

      Michael, what I meant is that it’s hard to understand which information is more or less correct. There is too many biased opinions that are not objective. Yes, you can find good and viable strategies, but it’s hard to distinguish them from tons of pretty much useless ones. The guys from the top, as you call them – don’t really have much to teach about. Most of them should be happy they had funds to register many domains for reg fee back then. Most of their posts are sadly about: a) I sold that great domains for xxx,xxx – I am pro. b) I sold 25 domains last week, but I forgot to add I own 100,000 domains. c) You all suck, I am the king.

      Ron, exactly. Most of domainers have no idea about this business. They want to buy cheap and sell super expensive. That’s all. As for advices, every person has it’s own faith to determine which advices they should take serious, and what they should ignore. The ones that pick more good advices usually succeed.

      Owen, door is open today. Nothing closed. The door closed for those who could invest $100 and turn that into xxx,xxx. But even now there are some lucky sales from time to time with mediocre domain names selling for high amounts. You can not rely on that if you have any viable business model. I did enter business in 2007 as you can read about. And had 10+ xx,xxx sales with my biggest sale at $207k.

      Derek, long time no see. ;-) You did shorten what I tried to say in 3 sentences.

    • Rod 15:25 on March 21, 2012 Permalink

      @Algis

      If you managed to get 10+ xx,xxx sales with your biggest sale at $207k, then what have you got to complain about?! Had you gone into in any other business you would probably have been lucky to have earned enough money to buy yourself the ingredients for a Colombian Porridge (Porridge.co) :)

    • Michael 18:23 on March 21, 2012 Permalink

      Nice article. Can relate. Envious of those bigger sales — well done. I’ll keep at it.

    • Algis 18:33 on March 21, 2012 Permalink

      Rod, I am not complaining. Just sharing my opinion.

    • Dietmar Stefitz 19:39 on March 21, 2012 Permalink

      I think, the US market is still very much alive. Here in Europe we can see a recession, special in some countries where we have big unemployment rates. But even in this countries, now is the time to buy. The big problem is for people with big portfolios, they have to clear their house! But with the New Gtld’s coming, we will see a great future and a lot of turnaround. Algis, anyway you know how to make Business !

    • Domain Magazine .Net 06:45 on March 22, 2012 Permalink

      Great article! I definitely agree with you. I just sell cheap PR domains at domain forum and search end user for my great domains. For newbie domain industry, I decide to create domain blog to share my little experience at domain industry.

    • Jeff 00:08 on March 23, 2012 Permalink

      In my opinion, in order to reach the next level, there should be many more domainers and they should not only buy high quality and expired names, but also massively handregister some new names in order to completely occupy the “virtual ground”. End-users will then realize that domain names is something they have to buy rather than to find as available. This will cause domaining to reach its real and full potential. In order to avoid new domainers to buy crappy domains an idea could be to create a collective database of “domains to registrer suggestions” managed by experienced domainers, so that the buying power of the new domainers is not wasted and so that all the good virtual land come in domainers hands, takes value and brings even more value to the rest. Another option is to have an “advisor service” where new domainers could submit the domains they plan to register to a panel of more experienced domainers. A strong and collaborative community is probably the only key to bring domaining to the next level and this will benefit everybody.

    • Sarah 08:25 on March 23, 2012 Permalink

      But Jeff, what value are you adding to the end user? Why should we want all the good real estate to end up in the hands of domainers? Getting lucky and/or benefitting from being smart in investment is ok, but locking up the inventory in order to change the perception of what to pay in the market — it just seems to be completely self-serving.

    • Stew 11:58 on March 23, 2012 Permalink

      Twenty-six factorial if you just use English characters. Wondering how many billions, or would that be trillions, of dollars it would take to completely occupy the “virtual ground” Me, I register long-tail keywords and keyword phrase domains because I have an exact match when people do searches.

    • Mike Ramsey 16:50 on March 23, 2012 Permalink

      I think this is quite a negative post. Name one industry where there isn’t misleading information online on how to make it big, and name one industry where money just drops into the lap of any person who gets involved. You have to pick your gurus as smartly as your domains. There are some honest top domainers out there who do contribute value to the community, but usually you won’t find them on forums. Gary Lam is one such guy worth checking out – Google Gary dot com. Branding is everything online these days and the demand by companies and IMs for exact match domains is driving prices up daily. Type in search is also growing, and therefore shorter more brandable domains are the ones to get hold of.

    • jayjay 17:37 on March 23, 2012 Permalink

      ” Well, of course obvious domains like cars.com are good no matter if you have domaining knowledge or not ”

      And that probably explains the intrinsic value in a good domain! if you need a degree in domain rocket-science brain-surgery to understand the value of your digital assets then your digital assets are worth hot air.

    • Rob 07:23 on March 24, 2012 Permalink

      There’s no such thing as an easy buck. And when there is, you need to be one of the first, before people looking for an easy buck arrive.

      I buy domains that regular folk would like. I don’t look at monthly exact searches. I don’t look at trends and profitable niches. I just think “that’s a nice domain name – somebody might like that one day”.

      And then I wait for someone to ask if they can buy it. It might take ten years, but I’m patient. Average sale price is 10x purchase price, but I expect it’ll take 10 years to sell them all.

      I mostly just buy short .coms that can be pronounced and have some kind of meaning or sound GREAT as a brand.

      Example, fela.net – bought as a dropped domain via NameJet for under $100, sold for thousands because as you can see, they had a legit use for it (as opposed to a spammy landing page).

      It’s like being an antique dealer – not about plugging a domain into a valuation tool, but knowing what people might want.

    • Ben 09:28 on March 24, 2012 Permalink

      I laugh when I hear people call domaining an “industry”! I would equate it to kids trading baseball cards. There are only so many quality .com’s out there. Don’t be fooled.

    • Attila 12:40 on April 19, 2012 Permalink

      @ Mike – I agree, Gary is someone pursuing a new vision to purchase only worthy domains rather then every domain in the book. I met with Gary in Hong Kong in the time of my life where I was this close to shutting everything down due to financial difficulties. Then I sold a few domains and was back in flush. He must think I am some whack job, but hopefully not :-p

      AND Mike Mann just hand registered 13,000+ dot com domains…giving the new perspective of “must buy domains rather then search for one that’s available” Fortunately Mike is reasonable with his domain prices unlike Frank Schilling and his unreasonable “every domain has to sell for over $5k range…or F off and find another domain since you don’t know any better attitude” (no pun intended for Frank directly, but wish he re-think his strategy on certain domains only worth $500~$2,500 but asking $5k~$15k…)

  • Algis 19:52 on March 19, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: back, doing, hello, how, im, you   

    Guess who’s back? 

    Hello! Technically I was not gone. But nonetheless I am happy to announce that I am back to blogging. I was switching my focus for a while, but was always in domaining. Have a lot of thoughts about what is going in our industry and why is that happening. So stay tuned. I will give you all some fresh non BS and not biased opinion.

    Can’t promise everyone will like it, but some people will for sure. And pretty much everyone will get a view from an interesting angle.

    Good to be back! ;-)

     

  • Algis 14:35 on March 16, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: google exact searches, information, search volume, tips and hints   

    So what google exact searches means? 

    I decided to share a bit of my knowledge and thoughts on what exactly exact matching keywords means for domain names. And what can the potential outcome be as a result of developing domain with high exact match search volume.

    First of all what is exact searches everyone is talking about? It is the amount of searches people do for your exact matching keywords per month. The number however is no 100% accurate. For example if your domain keywords said to be receiving 100,000 exact searches per month – that does not mean you will get 100,000 visitors if you will obtain top google position.

    Why? 1) because not 100% of those who are searching for it will end up clicking on YOUR link in google search results. 2) numbers can vary a little bit(sometimes more then a little bit). 3) there are local and global search volume, so you need to know how to check it and what all those numbers mean.

    So how do we find what our domain is performing? I will take an example of one of my domain names to show you. MensJewelry.com

    Now let’s see how many exact searches does this keywords get per month, based on the previous months numbers.

    So what do we see here. First of all we selected EXACT in the “match type” drop down menu. Then we sort the column by Local Search and select “All Countries and Territories” + English language.

    Now we can see that global volume of searches for February was:

    a) 450,000 for “men’s jewelry” keyword and 301,000 for [mens jewelry] keyword. that’s nice to know.

    b) monthly global average is 550,000 and 368,000 for domains. That is if you take all searches for the last 12 months and divide them by 12. We can think that since 450,000 in February lower then average 550,000 – then probably searches go up and down. Can they get higher when there is holidays? Of course they can. Seems logically to me.

    Now let’s try and see how many searches United States users provide from this global total amount. Let’s switch country to “United States” and have a look.

    Now we can see that users that are searching [men's jewelry] are pretty much all coming from United States as global 450,000 and United States 450,000 searches do match. On an interesting note there is less people searching for [mens jewelry] in USA then they do worldwide. Perhaps more people are searching worldwide because they can’t spell the word right. As it is one of the frequent mistakes from non native speakers to write [mens] instead of [men's].

    Another good thing for us is that men’s jewelry and mens jewelry results in google are practically identical, which means google understand that there is no domain names with ‘ in them and is matching [men's jewelry] search with a mensjewelry result.

    So we are looking at 676,000 United States exact searches in February here.

    In the next article I will explain my theory of exact match searches importance for commerce domain names with some real examples and will tell you how I appraise domain names when I purchase them from direct owners.

    Feel free to comment. Have a nice day.

     

    • Justinas 14:09 on April 13, 2010 Permalink

      Hello, where do you find these statistics of keywords?

    • Investor 13:52 on May 7, 2010 Permalink

      Dear Algis i know , you are expert and have good selling history. In your personal opinion how much, can cost my domain? http://phonecell.co.uk I did nothing, no seo no develop…just bought..and what to do right now? please give me an advice.

      thanks !

    • Latte 20:39 on February 4, 2012 Permalink

      Thanks for posts.

  • Algis 14:05 on February 14, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: advices, , upcoming videos   

    Need some REAL information and advice? Ask now! 

    Hey friends, since the last video in June 2009 I received TONS of emails(no shit). And people had many questions regarding different aspects of domaining, development, sales, negotiations, how to buy a domain from non-domainer, etc. etc.

    So what I come up with is this. Post a comment under this thread including the subject that you are interested in. And I will group them up in videos and will give you answers based on my expertise.

    Sounds good? Fair offer for you, free advices are never bad. ;-)

     

    • sineda 08:33 on March 10, 2010 Permalink

      In one of your videos you mentioned that you had experience in selling .DE domains. From your point of view – is it a good idea to use english words in it, for instance CruiseLines.de ? I’m not going to develop one, but rather make a quick flip. Thanks.

  • Algis 23:16 on February 13, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: layout change, small update, text   

    Changing the layout. More news to come. 

    Considering that most of the time I don’t have 60+ minutes to tell about something. I decided to change the blog layout. So I can have fresh content a bit more frequently.

    That doesn’t mean that videos are not coming though. I will try to get new video up and running soon. Have few important things to share.

    Stay tuned. ;-)

     

  • Algis 22:50 on June 15, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: development, , mass development   

    Video 5 – Domain development 

    What is the meaning of domain development? I am sharing my thoughts on what development really is and what you need to avoid when you start thinking about domain development. Don’t forget to follow me on twitter!

     

    • Perelman 11:10 on July 6, 2009 Permalink

      The post is right and good, but seems like nobody understood it – there are no comments :)

    • Amateur 15:27 on July 17, 2009 Permalink

      Thanks for posts. Can you tell us where I can sell domain http://www.afsas.com – African SAS? And how many this domain can cost?

    • wones 16:09 on July 24, 2009 Permalink

      Great video blog!

    • medee 07:12 on April 5, 2010 Permalink

      Thanks for video.

  • Algis 19:19 on June 10, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: idns, international domain names, opinion, video   

    Video 4 – International domain names 

    Today you will hear my opinion on International domain names(IDNs). More appraisal tips are coming later this week I think. Purchased HardDrives.com yesterday. :-)

     

    • Bruce 20:07 on June 10, 2009 Permalink

      Algis,

      It’s sanbio from Bido.com chat. Want to see a list of my names? email me at domains@dnaffiliates.com

    • Walt 20:44 on June 10, 2009 Permalink

      Good videos and congrats on your purchase of HardDrives.com. Do you share the how much you bought it for? :-)

    • tee1 23:40 on June 10, 2009 Permalink

      Awesome that you recommend buying idn.fr. where I can register hôtel.fr?

    • nam.es 23:55 on June 10, 2009 Permalink

      idn.fr, idn.ru and many others that actually make sense are not available for registration. What I meant when I said about .fr is that they would actually make sense. Local language IDN .cctld of same country.

    • Phio 00:15 on June 11, 2009 Permalink

      Hi,

      I’m not going to try to convince you that IDNs are going to be the next great thing to hit the internet. Perhaps Google’s Wave is or some new kind of facebook. I do think that IDNs will be big in the next few years based on my own research. What I am finding now is that End-Users are beginning to be interested in IDNs, not just domainers. I recently completed a sale of a Middle Eastern IDN which I am very happy about. We have seen IDNs move up to another level in the past 2 months. This is evident based on the number of IDNs being registered in their ‘home’ countries. Also, Google, Yandex, Baidu etc statistics are showing that many keyword and GEO searches are doubling within the year, and that people are searching extensively in their native tongues. These are not typos…users generally know what they are searching for.

      Also, the number of English speakers using the internet and the number of non-English speakers using the internet is about equal at this time (2009) Within a year or so the non-English speakers will surpass the English speakers by many millions. In fact, Chinese Internet users passed up American usage in 2008.

      That being said, IDNs do have a ways to go for many languages. Each language is different as you mentioned, and IDN.de is a great investment. Really it all depends on the language.

      Phio
      ps. you can click on my name to see an Arabic IDN minisite. =)

    • nam.es 09:43 on June 11, 2009 Permalink

      Hi Phio,

      see the main idea is not to tell people that LOCAL searches do not exist. It is to make their heads understand that owning russian IDN .com doesn’t mean ANY significant advantage over any other extension. IDN.ru could be great, IDN.IDN will be good. ruIDN.com – nope. It is just the attitude of Russian people and their habbits. They don’t need it and they don’t use it. Look at wordstat.yandex.ru and find any huge keywords with .com next to them. Now do the same with .ru, and now do the same with .ru in russian language. You can clearly see .com is nowhere near. And the fact that you have IDN .com will not help you to get quick into yandex top1 for your keywords. This is facts.

      I have nothing about investing in IDNs, I just want people to actually put some thought in it. It was like 5 years or more since Russian IDN .com’s – so where is it? :-)

    • Perelman 10:53 on June 11, 2009 Permalink

      Could you share how much you paid for harddrives.com?

    • Phio 11:12 on June 11, 2009 Permalink

      Yes I agree IDN.ru would be great, and if it were not for .ru, I wouldn’t be able to reg Russian IDNs with as much certainty. Although I do make mistakes because I wasn’t born in Russia.
      There was a guy on another forum about a year ago who was saying the same thing you are saying…at the same time he was regging ruIDN.com ‘s like crazy. Luckily I just kept on regging what I could. His being a Russian native definately has it’s advantages when it comes to registering IDNs. And when IDN.IDN does come for Russia, it will be fantastic.
      As far as Yandex goes. I submitted an IDN a few months back, and it was indexed in a couple of days, just looked for it but can’t remember, so I just submitted смайлик.com to Yandex, so maybe we can check back in a week. http://Xn–80aqcfdd8a.com

      Anyways, luckily we all have our own niche and it keeps the world turning.

      Phio

    • nam.es 11:17 on June 11, 2009 Permalink

      Phio,

      I did not say they will not be indexed. I said they will not be given any priority. Which renders owning ruIDN.com giving no advantage over owning any other ruIDN.cctld – that is my opinion.

      Also please don’t forget this is just my opinion. I don’t want to start a holywar.

      What I am saying is:
      1) if you go IDN, go local CCTLD or IDN.IDN
      2) do not spend much for names like IDN.com
      3) be sure to learn market and language difference, since be can be significantly different from what you get used to with other domains and extensions. e.g. the fact that .com rules the world doesn’t mean .com rules ruIDN. and so on.
      4) do what you think is right. you could be right after all or not. :-)

    • Phio 11:51 on June 11, 2009 Permalink

      :-) Yeah, the last conversation I had like this I ended up owing Pizza and beer!

    • Bill 14:59 on June 13, 2009 Permalink

      There are a LOT of Russian speakers, and local Russian addresses showing in the who.is for Russian idn.com and idn.net. It is speculated that there will be much politics and government control in awarding many idn.idn, and most certainly many names (especially City and various geo domains will be blocked for government use like has happened with .cn and .jp) making .com the main choice to build a site on. That is why idn Moscow.com is so valuable.

      It is also in the works that .com will become .com (idn) if you are familiar with Verisign proposal for DNAME (or some variant of aliasing). Most people will agree that idn.cctld are good choices, but many (especially Chinese domainers) will tell you very strongly that they believe idn.com will be “king” for idn domains in their language. As big as the internet is in Russia, I think that idn.ком will find a nice niche, especially with browsers that default to .com for type ins. JMO.

    • nam.es 17:12 on June 14, 2009 Permalink

      Bill, I don’t know much about chinaIDN.com – I never said my opinion on it. I just expressed my opinion on ruIDN.com that makes no sense, especially at ridiculously high prices.

    • hsnv 20:54 on June 18, 2009 Permalink

      that’s true

  • Algis 01:27 on June 7, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: domain auction, traffic amsterdam   

    Video 3 – Traffic Amsterdam opinion 

    Today I decided to share my opinion on 10k+ sales from Traffic Amsterdam. Probably nothing fresh and new for the crowd. More reviews coming soon in next videos on names, don’t miss them! And don’t be shy to comment.

     

    • Jan 14:26 on June 7, 2009 Permalink

      Thank you for your review of the auctions in Amsterdam.

    • Brian 22:49 on June 7, 2009 Permalink

      Can it have a simple point form note which can let users follow your idea more easy?

    • Chrisjr 23:51 on June 7, 2009 Permalink

      Great start on your video blog. I am American but enjoy your perspective as a non US investor. Looking forward to the next one!

    • Play 00:28 on June 8, 2009 Permalink

      Nice name for a blog; nam.es

    • Soji 18:44 on June 9, 2009 Permalink

      Thanks for your help, not many will offer such help. Am very grateful. Please keep it up and remember we are still wait for part 2 of the domain appraisal tips

    • thoma 10:11 on March 16, 2010 Permalink

      Great video.Thank you.

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