Namemon - Domain Market Monitoring Blog

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

News - Search Engines

Most people are familiar with Google's standard logo and generally consider it a staple of their daily search routine. Google has in the past, replaced this logo with festive logos on Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year's, Halloween and other US holidays. However, this change used to be simply a change of the logo itself. Over the past few months, this change has included a search result when clicked, sending the user into Google's search results with the top results for the term associated with the logo displayed. Most domainers and webmasters are familiar with this, and perhaps have even attempted to get a piece of the search traffic.

I have noticed that on Wikipedia, if the entry is highly-ranked for that result, it will receive what we call "ip vandalism" which is essentially users not logged in adding their links to the entry for some spillover traffic and revenue. We then request an IP lock on the page and this vandalism stops for the day. However, lately I have noticed a much more disturbing trend.

Bloggers with backends into news organizations have begun taking advantage of this result simply to generate traffic to their site. Since Google automatically shows news results first in a relevant search, any news website that posts about Google's logo is instantly awarded with about one million clicks. This is very enticing and we can see that this trend is creating its own type of unedited blogger.

For instance, last week Google's logo displayed a UFO as a logo with "unexplained phenomenon" as the search click. Harold Nolte at The Examiner clearly got very excited about this and posted "Google logo: is it an unexplained phenomenon?", which instantly drove millions of clicks, and hundreds of snide remarks, to the Examiner. Today, the new logo is also a UFO, over a field, with the search term set as "crop circles". Wikipedia is again the first result but above that we have various news articles. Early this morning, it was a ZDnet community article which has since been purged from ZD which pulled it off the front page in due time. But we still have 18 other articles, proving that everyone has realized that this show-stopper act is worth getting in on.

Who doesn't want a million clicks in one day? But clearly journalism is sinking to a new low - most notably by its lack of good editors. The only thing that is certain is this miniature explosion of fake search result articles at newsrooms is that it is going to explode in popularity and competition.

Expiring Names - NameJet

Topping off the Labor Day weekend at Namejet we saw one decent and one very large domain sale.

BridgeLoan.com - $27,101 - Definitely the week's biggest blockbuster sale. 132 Bidders entered and one man left. Winning bid was placed by Homer just edging out JBiz. The bidding war lasted over an hour as each upped the bid by a few hundred each minute. Other bidders who were willing to take this into the thousands before walking away included:

Another large item on the auction list was GarageDoorOpener.com, another premium generic with heavy search volume.

44 Bidders pushed the price to close out at $2,545 by vik22

This week's big pre-release auction will be THE.ORG. Already at $1,000 it is sure to reach $25,000 with nearly 200 bidders.

Expiring Names - GoDaddy

Here are some auctions you might have missed at GoDaddy this Labor Day weekend. Hopefully you enjoyed the good weather and the changeover from summer fun to work, school and autumn.

DATZ.com - Nice LLLL, pronouncable and even brandable despite the "Z". 95 bids brought this one to $4,000

Clippoo.com - A strong traffic domain (71k hits estiamted) with some brandability, $8,893 with 63 bids

FDA.net - Three premium letters and lots of search volume. $2,007

WhiteFang.com - A great Jack London novel and made into a movie in 1991. $1,011 with 75 bids

Diameter.org - A nice generic disctionary .org with 28 bids for $505

DiscountLasers.com - Simple generic with search volume, $628 with 50 bids

Upcoming Auctions - The following domains look like they will be the heavy hitters this week:

IGII.com - Another nice LLLL with triple repeating "I", already at $230

WEA.net - Premium 3L .net with bidding at $557 with 6 hours to go