With the release of so many new domain name extensions it’s time to revisit the issue of a domain name’s value. In the past I’ve always said dot com in king. But what about now that there are all those crazy new domain name extensions like the ones listed below… .academy .accountant .accountants .actor .adult …
The premium domain name 10.com is currently up for auction through Sedo’s premium auction service. The auction is scheduled to expire on March 26, 2009 at 1 pm EST. To date there has been 7 bids on this domain name but the reserve of 250,000 – 499,999 EUR has yet to been met.
I ran across some interesting information after reading lukeisback.com recently regarding David Lee Roth’s daughter, Brenna, entering the adult industry. No, she isn’t acting, rather she is buying up domain names as virtual real estate. Brenna has recently bought a few XXX domain names in hopes they will increase in value, although she isn’t developing them.
This got me thinking about some of the numbers. You may know that the original Luke Ford sold this website for $25,000. Interestingly enough, Porn.com sold for $9.5 million, which was the all time high until someone bought Fund.com for $10 million.
There are those who are in the speculation market too, who go out on a limb for a domain name that sounds sort of interesting and hope it will pay off in the long run. And that seems to be what Brenna is doing, even though she is just redirecting all her traffic.
So even Diamond Dave’s daughter finds value in online property. For those interested, and I’m sure there are a bunch of porn people out there reading who are, you can check out sites like www.NamePros.com where “domainers” hang out. You need to know your daily traffic, and more importantly the source of that traffic, how easy it is to spell and simply type in rather than Google it, and where these people are. Are they in the US, or are they in Germany?
The unique content is what its all about. Your site design can suck but the text is the important thing. Custom scripts on the site can add to the value too of course.
Just make sure not to infringe on copyrights and try to do anything that has such things as Walmart, Playboy, Microsoft, etc., in them. That’s a legal battle waiting to happen.
DNScoop.com or Estibot.com can help you gather basic info on your page, such as:
Name: YourDomainName.com
Age: How long your domain has been registered
Archived: If you are listed in archive.org, how far back is that listing?
Google Page Rank: Very important
Estimated Backlinks.
So let’s check out Lukeford.com:
Not too shabby, eh?
Here’s a few more facts for you. Domain names can only be up to 63 characters long, and the average is about 11 characters long. The minimum is now 3, however 1 and 2 character domain names have all been registered, as well as all the combinations of 3s. While I have no idea who would want them, the letter a as a domain name from 1 to 63 characters long (like a.com, aa.com, aaa.com, aaaa.com, etc.) have all been registered. The only one I can understand is aaa.com. Out of the 1219 male names listed in the US census bureau, every single one is registered now. Damn, I really wanted Ryan.com.
Symbolics.com, registered on March 15, 1985, was the first domain name ever registered. There are now more than 150 companies who can legally register domain names, although just a little over 10 years ago there was only 1. There are just over 2.5 million .COM and .NET new domain name registrations PER MONTH. Over 80 million domains are registered.
Back to the original point of this article, the lovely brenna Lee Roth, here’s a sad note … David Lee Roth doesn’t even claim Brenna as his daughter. But to tie it back to porn, she has a half sister who is a porn star by the name of Avy Lee Roth. And of course, Diamond Dave doesn’t claim her either. Whatever happened to DNA?