Month: January 2010

Bill Karamouzis, the CEO of Hallpass Media has created quite a buzz recently in the Domain Community over his purchase of the domain name CookingGames.com for $350,000. Bill even wrote a guest post on DirectNavigation.com that shared the story of another one of his web properties StickGames.com – a domain name that was previously owned by one of the “hardest, most stubborn, and least motivated sellers on Earth” – as Bill puts it in his guest blog.

One can only guess who that might be…

Why Pay $100K for the Domain Name StickGames.com?

The answer is easy: there’s literally hundreds of thousands of people who enjoy playing “stick games” online. Originally when Bill approached the owner about acquiring the name, the owner wanted $250,000. How’d the deal go down?

The domain was getting tons of traffic (confirmed between 1000-1500 type in a day) and the owners after our first contact wanted 250k for the domain, no stats and no revenue figures to be provided. I knew the domain was making nothing for them though, by using automated parking technology I could see all the ads were displaying “stick” game type stuff. Like hockey, skating and ads of this nature. I knew the disconnect was there and viewers were coming to play games and being shown hockey ads so the click through rates must have been nil. I countered offered with a final offer of 100k after a few weeks of back
and forth they relented….

StickGames.com Today

While the games market, like the dating market, is very competitive, he was still willing to a six-figure amount for the name. Bill writes:

It was alot of hard work and networking with many more factors then I’ve been able to list, but the point is a good business plan, hard work and the right assets in this case strong generic domains have helped us in a very crowded and competitive market. We are on track to recover our investment cost in the next 3 months, during one of the worst recessions of our time. Still deals to be had, still many opportunities to be had. Best of luck everyone one!

The phrase “stick games” gets about 135,000 Exact Local Searches. That’s a lot of interest, and likely a lot of type-in traffic. Since launching the stickgames.com web site — from the low X,XXX visitors to nearly 100,000 visitors per month according the December 2009 metrics on Compete.

And there are a lot of even smaller competitors trying to grab a piece of the Stick Games market; from theStickGames.com, to OnlyStickGames.com and even StickGameAddict.com. TheStickGames.com and OnlyStickGames.com, both receive about 8,000 visitors per month.

Type in the phrase stick games — and stickgames.com owns the top spot, but the list of web sites dedicated to stick games goes on and on and on. From stickflashgames.com to freestickgames.net.

We even did some available domain searches to see if there was anything worth hand-registering, but we didn’t find anything. Names like StickFigureGame.net and FunnyStickGames.com were two names we considered, but passed since we don’t know much about the GAMES market.

If you’ve played a few of the games on the StickGames.com website like “Stick Figure Penalty 2”, they’re pretty fun. In Stick Figure Penalty 2 you actually get to choose how you want to die, ranging from a large nail gun to a chainsaw. The disclaimer states, “not for the faint of heart”.

We can see how these online games, particularly stick games, can be addicting.

By the way, AddictingGames.com was one of Bill’s original properties that was sold to MTV Networks.

In 2004, using private capital, FPS Networks purchased the domain AddictingGames. Within 3 months of redevelopment FPS Networks had increased traffic by over 600%, catapulting AddictingGames into one of the top 5 casual gaming sites worldwide. FPS Networks sold AddicitingGames to Atom Entertainment (now part of MTV Networks) in 2005. AddictingGames continues to be one of the worlds largest casual game websites and FPS Networks worked with the MTV team for a smooth transition and continuous growth.”