Archive for March, 2010
ChickenShit.com, BirdsandBees.com, PocketVibrator.com, and other FUN names that have expired
We enjoy watching the domain name aftermarket web sites. It’s always interesting to monitor the expiring domain sites from day to day and see which domains have been allowed to expire by their owners.
And more recently, a lot of good names have appeared.
From Pocket Vibrators to the Birds and the Bees, there’s something for everyone when it comes to the aftermarket. Full of interesting names, fresh from expiring, NameJet and SnapNames are two of our favorite places.
Besides the traditional poorly registered names that expired, there are several names coming up for auction with a dose of pizzazz.
Using Urban Dictionary to check for relevance of Catchy Domains
If anything, many of the domains that show up on the aftermarket are definitely interesting to look at, and you’d be surprised with the history of some of these names. If you’ve ever wondered if any of your names have Urban flavor, one place on the web to check is UrbanDictionary.com. It’s not the most politically correct web site and their definitions sometimes go overboard, but it’s a good place to check if one of your catchy, brandable domains has any relevance.
Here’s a look see at some interesting domain names you’ll find on NameJet, along with their # 1 Urban Dictionary definition.
ChickenShit.com
Expired: March 5, 2010
Global Monthly Search Volume [Exact]: 2,400
Monthly Traffic: 0
Valuate.com Appraisal: $1,900
Current Number of Bidders: 24
# 1 Urban Dictionary Definition:
Coward… Cowardly… Wimp… Wimpy
That punk won’t fight because he’s a little chicken shit
PocketVibrator.com
Expired: March 10, 2010
Global Monthly Search Volume [Exact]: 590
Monthly Traffic: 0
Valuate.com Appraisal: $1,000
Current Number of Bidders: 40
# 1 Urban Dictionary Definition:
A smal, white vibrator. Costs about $40cdn and uses 2 ‘AA’ batteries.
The best thing to ever happen to drunken sex.
Pocket rocketes rule.
BirdsandBees.com
Expired: March 8, 2010
Global Monthly Search Volume [Exact]: 6,600
Monthly Traffic: 251
Valuate.com Appraisal: $830
Current Number of Bidders: 25
# 1 Urban Dictionary Definition:
According to tradition, the birds and the bees is a metaphorical story sometimes told to children in an attempt to explain the mechanics and consequence of sexual intercourse. According to that story the birds are like men and the bees like women: Birds are free to fly wherever they like, but bees are enslaved to a single queen their entire life and their whole life is dedicated to keeping her alive. Bees pollinate flowers, birds spread the seed, men impregnate eggs, women give birth. Sex is key for survival of both.
let me tell you ’bout the birds and the bees
Redneck.org
Expired: March 17, 2010
Global Monthly Search Volume [Exact]: 201,000
Monthly Traffic: 1,522
Valuate.com Appraisal: $830
Current Number of Bidders: 12
# 1 Urban Dictionary Definition:
You would be a redneck if:
You need one more hole punched in your card to get a freebie at the House of Tattoos.
You need an estimate from your barber before you get a haircut.
The biggest fashion risk you take is which plaid you’ll wear to the 4-H Fair.
You have flowers planted in a bathroom appliance in your front yard.
Your wife weighs more then your refrigerator.
You move your refrigerator and the grass underneath it has turned yellow.
You mow your lawn and find a car.
You can spit without opening your mouth.
Going to the bathroom in the middle of the night involves putting on shoes and a jacket and grabbing a flashlight.
You go Christmas shopping for your mom, sister, and girlfriend, and you only need to buy one gift.
Taking a dip has nothing to do with water.
Scarab.com
Expired: March 22, 2010
Global Monthly Search Volume [Exact]: 49,500
Monthly Traffic: 454
Valuate.com Appraisal: $14,000
Current Number of Bidders: 10
# 1 Urban Dictionary Definition:
a mix of an arab and a scorpion, there DNA fused together in a blender hence forth creating what is now known as a scarab. not much smaller than a normal man, about the hight of a seven year old wolf dog. often found in gardens and rubbish piles worldwide.
cory: jack theres one of them scarabs on the lawn.
jack: ok ok, dw ill get the shotgun.
cory: good…good
$17,600 Domain Name Coupons.info, Already Up and Running by Domain Name Addict Andrew Hazen
Surprising to some, the domain name Coupons.info recently sold through GreatDomains for $17,600. The name was acquired by a company that knows a little bit about the domain name and online coupon business – AllCouponsDirect.com.
All Coupons Direct not only owns and operates free coupon websites in a number of different categories, it’s also owned by Hazen Holdings, LLC – or better known as Andrew Hazen who runs Prime Visibility and regularly blogs at AndrewHazen.com.
While the domain name Coupons.info currently redirects to Allcouponsdirect.com, expect much bigger things with the .info domain from Andrew Hazen. Andrew is an SEO expert and has been recognized on Fox Business and the A&E Biography Channel for a documentary on Google.
Andrew also runs Prime Visibility, a search engine marketing company that employs more than 50 people and in both 2007 & 2008 made the INC List of Fastest Growing Companies in the U.S.
All Coupons Direct contains a network of free coupon websites from allbabydiapercoupons.com to allpizzacoupons.com – sites that collectively reach thousands and thousands of unique visitors per month. Type in ‘cereal coupons’ into Google Search, and the top search result is none other than Andrew’s allcerealcoupons.om – a site which allows you to download and print free cereal coupons.
Andrew Hazen is a Domain Name Addict
In addition to all of Andrew’s businesses and ventures, he’s a domain name addict – words taken straight from his “About” page, and one of Andrew’s most recent projects is AllInternetIdeas.com where he educates people on the value of domain names.
If you’d like to learn more about Andrew Hazen, visit his website http://www.andrewhazen.com/. You can also follow him on Twitter http://www.twitter.com/AndrewHazen
Owner of JerseyShore.com cashes in on domain name, and sells
In early January we wrote about the domain name JerseyShore.com and how the owner failed to cash in on the success of MTV’s Jersey Shore reality TV series, as a blank page served as the home page instead of a destination web site for the Jersey Shore.
In January 2010, traffic to JerseyShore.com jumped to over 25,000 unique visitors according to Compete.com and now the domain has changed hands on March 28, 2010 to the owner of WildWood.com.
Ironically, the owner of WildWood.com left a comment back in January on our old Commenting system:
I am a big fan of Wildwood and the Jersey Shore. The southern Jersey Shore is a much different atmosphere then portrayed by the MTV show…
Details on the price are unknown, but you can guarantee this is a geo domain name worth owning with MTV pushing out free marketing for the web site.
MTV has just started production on Season 2 of the popular reality show which will air this summer.
One of the most recognized pages online Expires: PageNotFound.com
One of the most recognized terms on the internet “Page Not Found” also known as HTTP 404 error has expired. Registered since 1999, the domain name PageNotFound.com expired on February 24, 2010. Though the keywords “Page Not Found” get a fairly low search volume (less than 1,500 searches locally) traffic to the URL averages nearly 1,000 unique visitors per month.
It might be difficult monetizing a domain name like this, but nonetheless, it’s attracting bids at NameJet. 24 bids already at the time of this story. The domain goes to auction April 1, 2010.
Another domain name with the keyword “page” in its URL sold in 2009 for $50,000 on Afternic. Ironically though, it averages about the same amount of traffic as the traffic to PageNotFound.com despite the $50,000 price tag.
Domain Name CamRoulette.com Sold for $151,000, but will it really change hands or is it a tease?
Domain Madness 2, the live domain auction, ended up with strong numbers boosted entirely by one domain name: CamRoulette.com.
The domain name sold for a staggering $151,000, in a story that many find hard to believe, not just newbies in the Domain industry. We occassionally have to remind ourselves that sales like these are the beauty of playing in the domain game.
Like any investment that has risks, there can also be rewards.
If this big sale of CamRoulette.com closes, then it will certainly be the success story of domain names in 2010 that demonstrates anything’s still possible in this industry.
Inspired By Millions of People Flocking to ChatRoulette?
Built by a Russian high school student, the ChatRoulette.com web site has become the latest craze — driven by people wanting to see what other people staring at Webcams are doing.
While it’s still hard to believe anyone would pay that price for a domain name based on the popularity of another web site, if anything can be learned from the prices paid for Tube related domain names, expect to see prices of Roulette domains follow along in the next year. NudeTube.com sold for over $100,000 in 2008 and more recently, DownloadTube.com sold for $33,000 in February 2010.
Every domain investor looks to have their dreams come true by getting paid an insane amout of money for domain name. But it’s even more of a dream come true, when the name was recently registered.
Results of Domain Madness 2 Live Auction
Here are the other auction results from the Domain Madness auction.
SecurityGuards.com $20,000.00
PalmSpringsHomes.com $14,000.00
PokerCaddy.com $5,000.00
VideoRoulette.com $5,000.00
FootballUniforms.com $2,500.00
InternetHistory.com $2,500.00
LumberStore.com $2,000.00
FamilyClinic.com $2,000.00
TaxTool.com $1,500.00
RacingStats.com $1,100.00
FreeHosting.org $1,000.00
JigsawPuzzles.net $775.00
DrumForum.com $335.00
LoanAdjustor.com $275.00
PoolShowers.com $151.00
DoingAnything.com $151.00
MessagingRecliners.com $151.00
BrooklynCondominium.com $102.00
GymnasticsShoes.com $101.00
PortablePuttingGreen.com $51.00
Yahoo! Continues Dumping their Domain Assets by Selling Domain Name ClassicGames.com for $25,000
If ClassicGames.com was previously owned by Yahoo! as everything indicates, Yahoo! has been on a tear lately, selling off several of their domain name assets with the recent sales of MusicVideos.com, LookUp.com, and FreeComputers.com. They also made news when they sold contests.com last year. However, they did make a notable purchase: OMG.com for $80,000 for their Celebrity News web site.
In early January CookingGames.com sold for a whopping $350,000 to Hallpass Media. Sales petered off after that for “games” domains with ArcadeGames.org selling for $1,060 and ViewGames.com selling for $300 on Snapnames – that is, until today.
Sedo GreatDomains announced the sale of ClassicGames.com for $25,000.
Back in 1997, ClassicGames.com, was an internet game room, that featured multiplayer games online ranging from Chess to Freecell. But by 2000, the website ClassicGames.com was Yahoo! Games that offered games for kids. In 2005 was still Yahoo! Games.
Take a look at the screenshot on the left from 2005 via Archive.org. Around 2006, the site was no longer operational, and a message in the footer simply read, “For information regarding www.classicgames.com, please contact: ovdm_ysbdomain@yahoo.com”.
Leap of Faith Financial Services Inc (http://www.loffs.com/) who own over 500 domain names, appear to be the new owners according to the Registrant records. The domain name gets over 60,000 searches globally.
Another one bites the dust: Companies Going Out of Business let their Big-Money domains expire
One of the largest Pharmacy and gift shops in Northern Michigan, who also got their hands on a good domain name back in the nineties, appears to be the latest “Going out of Business” victim, with a domain name that was allowed to expire, instead of being renewed.
The domain name Punches.com expired March 16, 2010. Going back to 1998, Punches Pharmacy Plus a local Michigan Pharmacy had a website online. Earlier we wrote about AuctionDrop, a company that raised millions in the mid-2000s to build and market their business, only to shut their doors and let their domain name AuctionDrop.com expire.
Even though many companies go out of business for financial reasons, it’s surprising to see the company pull the plug on the domain name and not even renew it. Or for that matter, anyone who previously worked at the company snatch up the name.
The domain name Punches.com already has 44 bids over at NameJet and it doesn’t even go to auction until April 20, 2010. While it’s not a category killer domain name, it’s got potential, especially for someone looking to cash in on Mixed Martial Arts.
The domain, according to Valuate.com, appraises at $38,000.
Sex.com the biggest waste of money for a domain name, and it’s not the only one (there are plenty of more)
Back in 2007 the domain Porn.com was purchased for $9 million, making it one of the top 5 domain sales ever reported. But the category-killer domain name didn't place the web site Porn.com in the top 5 adult sites on the internet. Not even close.
The whole argument that you have to have a category-killer domain name to be successful in business is getting silly and it’s becoming even less and less of an argument as more and more people realize that good content, a good business plan, marketing, search engine optimization and other web 2.0 factors become more important than a domain name.
Does location matter on the internet?
As with most businesses, online and offline, location matters, but it’s not the bottom line on the web. It certainly helps to own the .com to catch type-in traffic, but once you build a successful brand, people will be typing in your domain name in their address bar and not some category killer name.
Porn.com barely gets over 1 million visitors per month.
PornHub, gets over 11 million visitors, per month. Its content is free and high quality, making it a much better alternative to people searching and viewing porn.
YouPorn gets 6 million visitors per month. YouPorn.com the domain name, wasn’t even registered until December 2005, long after the domain land rush. And since launching its website in 2006, it has become one the most popular pornographic websites on the internet. It didn’t take $14 million or $9 million to register the domain name, it took less than $10.
While sex.com goes continues its drama and bankruptcy proceedings, other sites could just as easily pop up on the internet for a lot less money and in short time, easily takeover the popularity of the sex.com web site.
There are even simple blogs that post one or two photos per day like Taxidrivermovie.com (NSFW) that get more visitors than sex.com and are operated by one person.
In the dating world. Plenty of Fish is a great example. Its run by three people after becoming a full time business for the founder Markus Frind in 2004. PlentyofFish.com gets almost 4 million visitors per month, putting it far ahead of Chemistry.com and not too far behind Match.com (a site that heavily advertises) and employs more than 300 people worldwide.
High prices, still good to see
We are, after all, domainers, so getting a strong or astronomical return on a domain investment is important as sellers. But fooling people into thinking that owning a category-killer .com domain name will make or break their business is becoming less and less of an argument.
There are plenty of options, including other top level domains, but more importantly, good content and good business.
If you think you can’t launch a business online because you don’t own the category-killer .com domain name, you’d be wrong. You can. Sure, you might have to spend some money on marketing, but every company spends a marketing budget, even companies with category-killer domain names. And no single domain name will ever save you from a failed business model – sex.com, is case in point.
Domain Name of eBay Drop-off store that raised Millions in VC, Expires and ends up on Aftermarket
It's not easy finding information on AuctionDrop Inc after 2008, even when we search through the Google News archives.
AuctionDrop one of the rising stars in the eBay Drop-off business in the early 2000s that had raised millions of dollars has ended up on the domain name aftermarket. The domain name AuctionDrop.com expired on March 1, 2010 and is pending renewal or deletion. It’s up for bidding right now at NameJet with a backorder due date of April 5, 2010.
The company struggled to survive early on, and after getting millions in venture capital, the business switched from standalone stores to partnering with UPS in an effort to sustain its business.
The demise of the website remains a mystery to us. And the fact the domain name wasn’t renewed by anyone involved in its operations in the past, is even more of a more mystery.
DatingSecrets.com sells for $25K: Follows Dating.org, Singlesdating.com to lead 2010 Dating Domain Names
Another five-figure dating domain name has sold in 2010. DatingSecrets.com sold for $25,000 on Sedo Great Domains. With the sale of DatingSecrets.com, 2010 has seen a strong start for domains related to dating.
Other top sales in 2010 include Singlesdating.com which sold for $16,722 and Dating.org which sold for $22,500 (still our pick for BEST BUY of 2010).
Both of those names are parked.
There is a web site online for DatingSecrets.com, but that’s the previous owner’s site that’s been online for years. Currently the registrant information is marked as Sedo Transfer Service. Once the name switches hands, the new owner is likely to replace the current website, and assuming they want to keep the URL indexed in Google, they will likely avoid Parking the name.
DatingSecrets.com currently ranks at the top of Page 2 in Google Search Results. DatingAdviceSecrets.com, the web site that ranks near the top of Page 1 in Google for the keywords “dating secrets” gets as many as 25,000 unique visitors per month according to Compete. It’s built on WordPress and has very little content, but tons of comments by visitors.
People want the secrets to dating.
