Month: December 2010

Categories
News

Mult-millionaire Rick Schwartz projects 40 of his hand-registered 2010 domains will rake in $4 million in next 10 yrs

millions of dollars

Multi-millionaire domain investor Rick Scwhartz whose biggest publicly reported sale to date is Candy.com for $3M+Equity, revealed earlier today that he hand-registered nearly 3,000 (2,840 to be exact) domain names in 2010 – his most in a single year since he first started buying domain names in the early nineties.

For those of you not familiar with the term “hand registered”, basically, it means buying a domain name that isn’t registered and is available to anyone who wants it.  Instead of paying hundreds, if not thousands of dollars later on the aftermarket, hand registered domain names can be purchased for around $10.

About 99% of the names Rick expects won’t bring in any significant revenue, but forty of the domain names he projects will be longterm investments that will rake in $4 million in the next 10 years.

2800 of those babies may expire or have no value because it was time related or become Pigeon Shit. But the 40 others, I expect they will rake in some $4 Million over the next decade and provide a nice return. I know many of you don’t like or agree with this approach. Ok. But it is tried and true and it works for me because I have patience and look at things with an eye that combines the evolution of business with the evolution of consumers and then factor in plain old evolution. Success breeds more successes and more folks looking for success.

And 2010 isn’t over yet.  Rick hand registers domain names on a daily basis looking towards the future.  Rick writes:  “They won’t have much value in 2010. But come back in 10 years.”

How these 40 domain names will bring in $4 million in profit, is not known.  It’s a statement that many won’t believe, but if anyone can do it, Rick Schwartz can.  Remember the story of iReport.com – Rick Scwhartz sold that name CNN for $750,000.  He originally hand registered the name iReport.com for “$70 to $100.”  

Read more about the 2,840 hand registered domain names by Rick Schwartz on his blog.

Categories
News

Seller of domain name Decide.com turns a $160,000 profit in five years

woman holding cash

There were several reports in the domain world about the sale of the name Decide.com for $175,000, but what wasn’t reported was that the seller turned a profit of nearly $160,000 on the sale.  Buying and selling domain names can generate some nice revenue, and Decide.com is just one great example.

It started back in 2005, when the domain name expired on 06/30/2005 and went into a state of pending renewal or deletion.  The name then found its way to SnapNames, where it was reportedly purchased for $15,250 according to the Sales History tool provided by DomainTools.

AfternicDLS, the domain listing service, then reported the sale of Decide.com for $175,000 in its weekly Sales report for Dec 6 – Dec 12.  The sales results looked pretty good for Afternic.  It reported a number of five-figure sales including peddle.com for $30,000 and Bubbleshooter.com for $30,000.

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As pointed out by Andrew Allemann of Domain Name Wire, a quick look at the Whois records shows that the operators of Price Yeti, are the new owners of the domain: decide.com.

If you’re not familiar with Price Yeti, it’s privately funded startup launched in 2009 that allowed you to track items across all online retail sites, then the site notified you when the price of an item drops.

Price Yeti

In the last several months, PriceYeti has gone offline while the owners get ready to unveil something new (possibly using Decide.com?).  Until the new site launches, you can take a look at the old site here.

Categories
News Video Games

CookingGames.com makes a splash in its short time online, outpacing other Hallpass Media properties in traffic

cooking games

Cookinggames.com is outpacing other Hallpass Media entertainment properties in visitor traffic according to the latest Compete rankings.

When the domain name CookingGames.com sold in January 2010 for $350,000 through NoktaDomains, casual gaming was suddenly the talk of the town, with many domain investors clamoring over the price in the blogs and forums.  The online comments ranged from disbelief to shock.

Bill Kara, the President of Hallpass Media, even wrote a guest post on Larry Fischer’s blog over at DirectNavigation.com titled: Amazing Guest Post by The Purchaser of CookingGames.com – A Must Read. 

Bill started the story with the following statement: “If you think Hallpass Media paid alot for cookinggames.com (350k) then you might be surprised at what we paid for stickgames.com…”

How has 2010 been for CookingGames.com?

Well, according to a rough estimate by Compete, the site that launched just over six months ago has experienced a +3,993.05% change in yearly traffic, with nearly 400,000 unique visitors per month (395,348 to be exact, as  of Nov. ’10).

Hallpass Media Traffic

For those of you that still haven’t seen what the Cooking Games web site is all about, you can better appreciate the site’s draw by visiting the Most Popular Games section and as the site says, bake a delicious treat for a birthday, wedding, anniversary, special occasion or just whenever.

Categories
News Video Games

New site launched on MilitaryGamer.com – building out domains as blogs certainly takes time to do

military video games

Now that I’ve had time in 2010 to re-think my strategy on domain names I’ve acquired over the last few years, I’ve decided to take a handful of domain names that I own and launch a blog. 

MilitaryGamer.com, which has only been online a few weeks, is a lot easier to keep up since I’m a big fan of military first person shooter games like Call of Duty.  As most of my readers know, I like to invest in military-oriented names like ArmyVehicles.com and MilitaryTrivia.com.  With MilitaryGamer, the idea behind the blog is to provide articles on military video games, cheats, walkthroughs, trailers and reviews – the things avid gamers are searching on.

I’m not a developer.

I like blogging, so putting up a web site online about something I enjoy is a no brainer that is a lot easier to maintain, but certainly still takes time to do. 

MilitaryGamer.com Domain Background

The domain name MilitaryGamer.com used to be a fully developed website devoted to the gaming community as far as back as 2003 according to the WayBack Machine (which explains a lot of the backlinks established). 

I picked up the name on NameJet a year ago for $69 after it had expired, about the same time I picked up other $69 names like Videogamejunkies.com which also had expired.

Even though you may not be too familiar with the military gaming community, it’s a popular niche.  From the perspective of a webmaster, there is a lot of demand to have a site dedicated to military video games.

MilitaryGamer.net is registered.  MilitaryGamers.com is a growing community of prior and current U.S. military service members who share a common interest in gaming.  There is even  a newly formed gaming news resource site on TheMilitaryGamer.com.

Building out on WordPress

Of course, you might be wondering what MilitaryGamer.com is built on. 

MilitaryGamer is built on arguably the best platform for non-developers – WordPress.  The site uses the very same premium WordPress theme here on Fusible – WP-Prosper by Solostream.  The theme bills itself as: “a clean, professional WordPress theme suitable for a a business website, blog or online magazine.”  Though every blogger has a reason for the theme they use, WP-Prosper comes chock full of features:

WordPress 3.0+ Compatible (Including Menu Management)
Clean, Two-Column Layout with Widgetized Sidebar
Optional Footer Widgets
Theme Settings Page for Easy Customization
Quick and Easy Custom Logo Integration
Two Different Featured Content Gliders (Wide and Narrow)
Multiple Home Page Layouts
Threaded Comments
Gravatar Integration
Easy Banner Ad Integration
Post Thumbnails
Drop-Down Navigation (WP 3.0 Ready)
SEO Optimized
Simple Social Networking Integration
Built-In Subscription Widget and YouTube Videos Widget
Multiple Page Templates
Built-In Author Page

And of course, the theme is full of great features, but it’s the free plug ins that make a difference.  Some of the plug-ins used on MilitaryGamer include the All In One SEO Pack, Echo, Fast Secure Contact Form, Get The Image, Like, MobilePress, Most Popular Tags, WP Tweet Button and Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

You’ll probably notice the look and feel of the MilitaryGamer logo. 

Military Gamer

The logo was designed for free online using CoolText.com.  Since this is a test project, there’s no incentive to spend a bunch of money.  Aside from the time spent setting up the site, the cost has been kept low, with the biggest cost being the purchase of the theme which I use across other blogs like Tweetups.com, then the domain name for $69. 

Traffic

Though it’s only been a few weeks since first expanding the domain name into a full blog, the site is already up to a couple hundred unique visitors per day with no search engine marketing or paid advertising.  A couple hundred visitors is not much at all, but it’s quickly growing.  A big help has certainly been the use of images in posts which have quickly been indexed by Google’s Image Search within a week of being online. 

Google Image Search

The web site is already ranking well in the search engines for phrases like “Military Video Games” and “Military Games”, and since there has been a steady uptick in traffic from a few readers per day to over 200 in just a few weeks, MilitaryGamer.com is a website we plan to keep online.   

Categories
Movies News

Sean Parker’s biggest contribution to domain names: Drop the “The”

Sean Parker

TechCrunch has posted an article about the parody video on YouTube titled Drop The The (The Social Network Song) that was produced by Benji Samit and Dan Hernandez of Single Serving Films. 

Dressed up like Justin Timberlake and surrounded by bling, the fake Sean Parker raps about dropping the word “The” from Facebook and other companies like “The Gap”.

If you haven’t watched the movie “The Social Network”, in one scene, Sean Parker who co-founded Napster and was played by Justin Timberlake in the film, advises Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin during their first dinner meeting to drop the word “the” in the company’s name and web address: TheFacebook.com.   

It’s been reported that Facebook then bought the domain name Facebook.com in August 2005 for a reported $200,000.

It looks like the video may go viral with the help of TechCrunch, but at the time of this story it has just over 1,000 views on YouTube.