Buying and Selling domain Names

 

 Now who hasn’t thought about making  easy money by simply thinking up a fantastic Domain name  and selling it for big bucks ? I mean, how hard can it be ?

  Years ago during the .com bubble ,I would read about Domain names that sold at  auction for millions of dollars . And the only thing this soon to be Millionaire had to do was sit in front his computer and think up a domain name.  Names like heaven.com, hell.com , sex.com, insurance.com,flowers.com, business.com were all taken  ,and they were worth big bucks.   Maybe If I Think long and hard I could come up with a really cool name worth at least a couple of  Thousand dollars.

  I found a site called Greatdomains.com and tried my luck at striking it rich. Hours upon Hours of plugging in names to the site only to find that the name is either taken or people are doing what’s called cybersquatting .The same thing that I was planning to do. You buy a domain name with no intention of developing a site.You just sit on the name and try to sell it on some other site.

Finally I find one I like,  sellsuccess.com . Sounds good right?  It’s a generic name that could be used for any type business. And I, with my superhuman brain am the only one who has thought of it.

 Now that I have the Name, what do I do with it?  Try and sell it of course.  But what is it worth?  Great Domains had an appraisal service  that  I could use. (for only $49 dollars) convenient no?

So I ordered my appraisal and waited, and waited, and waited. Finally after two months I received a packet in the mail. Great domains must have been swamped  with work back then. Yes ,life was good for internet companies.

My appraisal for the Domain name sellsucces.com  came with all sorts of stats and graphs, and a nice looking plaque that I could hang on the wall to show the world that I own a (drum roll please) $40,000 domain name.

Of course I took this price to be somewhat exaggerated but I’m not the expert so I listed it for sale on Great domains.Yes they will even re-sell it for me too.(for a 5% cut). No luck at $40,000 so I started to progressively lower my price until I hit $1000 dollars. No sale, and as the .com boom turns to .com bust , I let my domain name expire and be re-absorbed by The machine.

I followed this name , and still do, just out of curiosity  to see if someone will develop it into a site. One person bought it and made a half-ass attempt at a web site ,then either did as I did and let it expire or he is just sitting on it.

Over the years and up to just recently  I have bought more Domain names, I havent made any money off them , but I have developed some sites. Remember when   ©Adobe photoshop came out? I thought those photo shopped pictures where the coolest thing out there. So I bought photo-shopped.com ,.net,. I was planning on developing a site where people could display their phot0 shopped projects. But I learned that Adobe would probably come after me for Trademark infringement of their name “©photoshop “. So I tried to sell the names to no avail.

Bottom Line- I haven’t made any money buying and selling names. But it’s still a favorite pastime of mine.  Just like playing the lottery ,It only takes one time to be a winner.