Are owners of “Group Buying” domains poised to cash in?

Do owners of “group buying” domains stand to cash in on their relevant domain names? Type in GroupBuying.com into your browser and a parked page hosted by Parked.com appears. Type in GroupBuy.com and a blank page with whitespace appears.

One reader asked the question, “I wonder how much GroupBuying.com would sell for at auction right now.”

The free domain appraisal service Valuate.com used by many domain investors to help gauge the buy and sell price of names, only places the value of the name at $1,700. But that’s not really an indicator of the name’s value. GroupBuying.com would likely fetch a large sum of money if it went to a major public auction website as the “group buying” trend picks up and continues to recieve lots of news, and even more venture capital.

New “Group Buying” sites, aren’t all relying on keyword domains

With the rising number of sites launching, many aren’t necessarily relying on keyword domains related to the Group Buying concept – they’re depending on their brand and marketing to do the selling – and a lot of paid advertising on the web. LivingSocial.com with nearly 80 million daily users, didn’t use “daily deals” or “bargains” in the name. The company doesn’t even own BuyingSocial.com.

Type in “daily deals” or “group discounts” and none of the top Group Buying sites rank well, but they have paid out for sponsored ads on search engines like Google.

HomeRunDelivers spent six figures to buy and brand their group buying online business with the domain HomeRun.com.

And while there are several sites gaining attention like BuyWithMe.com, Kevin Ham who owns over 400,000 domain names, and who likely owns something very relevant to daily bargains or group buying – instead went with GoodNews.com. A name that sounds a lot less like a group buying site offering discounts or coupons, and a lot more like a site offering hope for visitors — which would’ve probably been a better fit for his Gospel Media network.