Namemon - Domain Market Monitoring Blog

Today we will be Live Blogging the US House of Representatives  Subcommittee on Courts and Competition Policy - Hearing on: The Expansion of Top Level Domains and its Effects on Competition

11:15 - Finally got it working. Will post updates shortly.

11:25 - Commitee member is asking if ICANN can do their job essentially? A very wide question with the answer with Doug Brent talking about how ICANN secures the root zone and how China needs its own ICANN appoved extension.

11:30 - How will this proposal assist with securing the Internet and Intellectual Properties?

response: Things are not as secure as they should be. This proposal is moving forward without considerations.

11:32 - What enforcement methods will ICANN have to keep gTLDs from violating their own rules?

Brent: Make it easy for IPs to challenge names. There's room to allow this to work better than it does.

DelBianco: If you have the right rules, maybe. Because enforcement is what counts. Right now we don't have any enforcement. Rules become obsolete the minute they are created.

Legislators have 5 days to submit new material. After that the committee will provide its recommendations.

Too bad I missed most of this due to the very poor method of streaming used by the US Subcommittee. It actually took raw file editting to get at the stream. We'll do better next time.

Expiring Names - NameJet

The following names brought strong bids at Namejet last week. Here's a brief table summarizing each auction.

Expiring Names - GoDaddy

We didn't see any amazing 3 letters or acronyms last week, but here's a few domains that found new owners through high bidding for the week of September 14th through the 20th of 2009:

Domain Name	Current Price	Asking Price	Bids		Time Left
rainbowgames.com	$606	$10	39		AUCTION CLOSED 09/14/2009 10:34 AM (PDT)
56st.com	$355	$10	20		AUCTION CLOSED 09/14/2009 02:21 PM (PDT)
nsid.com	$600	$10	55		AUCTION CLOSED 09/15/2009 11:06 AM (PDT)
remoting.com	$505	$10	35		AUCTION CLOSED 09/18/2009 10:38 AM (PDT)
rssarticle.com	$752	$10	9		AUCTION CLOSED 09/20/2009 10:17 AM (PDT)
paranormalinsider.com	$200	$10	35		AUCTION CLOSED 09/20/2009 10:53 AM (PDT)
financebusinessblog.com	$286	$10	44		AUCTION CLOSED 09/20/2009 12:47 PM (PDT)
cdduplicators.com	$715	$10	21		AUCTION CLOSED 09/20/2009 01:41 PM (PDT)
beddingfactory.com	$371	$10	19		AUCTION CLOSED 09/20/2009 02:00 PM (PDT)
99fonts.com	$333	$10	28		AUCTION CLOSED 09/20/2009 02:21 PM (PDT)

The names listed above were generally non-ranked with a few backlinks, so essentially pure auction sales. Our winner was CDDuplicators.com with a $715 winning bid. Search volume on this keyword and ownership of CDDuplication by a major firm will probably put the resell price of this one over $3,000.

Auctions - Sedo

This afternoon at 3 PM EST, Xoxide.com closed on Sedo at $76,000 to as of yet unknown bidder. For most, this number would represent a large sum for a brandable domain, but Xoxide is much more.

Xoxide's former owner asserts that the domain receives 200k uniques monthly, and grosses 2.4 million per year. Since proof is not provided in the form of IRS statements or financials of any kind, domainers who would like to bid on this domain are forced to use the tools available to them to create an evaluation.

As posted on Namepros yesterday, our methods for buying traffic without getting a firsthand look at the statistics force us to use the estimates provided by common traffic providers. The most prominent of these are Alexa, Compete and Quantcast. Alexa provides Global statistics on traffic and keywords. Quantcast and Compete provide US traffic and keywords as well as demographic analysis.

First, looking at Alexa's stats, we see that Xoxide has been averaging a 40k rank, with primary search terms of "computer cases", "computer case" and a myriad of other tech items. When searching on Google we see that we have #1 rank for several of these terms with heavy ad competition (over 200 advertisers for computer cases). Users typically view about 5 pages, which is about average for a tech products targeted site, and bounce is about 40% which is a bit high, but this might be accounted for by users clicking "add to cart" which redirects to order.store.yahoo.net/xoxide. Alexa also shows us that the majority of the traffic to the site is US Visitors, about 80%. We can now use this formula to calculate the net result of traffic with the other providers.

Compete's data for Xoxide shows about 45k monthly visitors, Quantcast about 25k monthly. Taking the average of these two we could say that Xoxide gets about 35k monthly US visitors, and with Alexa displaying US traffic at 80% of total, this would put traffic around 40k total worldwide.

So now we have determined within some reasonable measure, what the total traffic to the site is on an average monthly basis over the past 3 months. This is probably the most complete methodology we can use without seeing the raw data. While each one of these sites we have used could potentially be incorrect, by putting all three together and averaging them out we can say we are at least close to the final number.

Since our search terms all match, we can try to guess what this traffic is worth. Adwords bids for computer cases are near the $2 mark, and payout would probably be about $0.40 per click if done properly with Adsense, Chitika, Clickbank etc. Click Through Rate (CTR), should be at least 10% since we are directly relevant to our content, and with 40k users that's about 10,000 clicks at .40 cents, or net $4,000 per month as a lowball sum.

Provided Xoxide was at least a break-even business model, those clicks are worth their full bids, so I would at least triple the lowball guaranteed ad revenue we just laid out. This would put earnings at between $10k and $15k per month, or $125k per year and up. I believe that to a direct resell computer case manufacturer this would be worth at least 5 year's earnings, due to the solid ranking at the top of the list. Anyone who purchased this will hopefully start making phone calls to some smart corporations and get this in someone's pockets for a cool 750k or more.

We'd like to thank Vuksan over at ExploreTheWorldOf.Me for linking back to our article "Google Permits Geo-Target of .ME Domains" posted August 27th with their follow up article of the same date at Explore The World of Me. We expect that .ME popularity will grow as more companies sign up for the short and very brandable ccTLD.

Exploretheworldof.me is the blog of the .ME tld and can be reached at Domain.me