Categories
News

So what happened with Eric Borgos and his 9,000 domain names?

Name Shopping

In mid-November Eric Borgos wrote a story on his company’s blog entitled: What To Do With My 9000 Domain Names?

The story sparked a lot of interest from readers and people started commenting with their own thoughts on what Eric should do with his 9,000 domain names.  Readers posted over 100 comments on the site that were all over the place – some offering to buy several of the names, to some suggesting Eric mass-sell or drop the worst of the domain names. 

Eric laid out a number of ideas in the beginning of the article on what he wants to do. 

Selling all his domain names at once to one buyer at wholesale prices was at the top of his list of considerations.  Eric wrote: “for $8 million for example, I would make $15,000/month in interest from the money in the bank (after income taxes and the brokerage fee I would net around $4.5 million from the sale) plus I would gain another $2000/month from the savings on domain fees (the difference between my parking income and my registration fees) that I no longer have to pay.” 

Unfortunately, there are very few buyers of portfolios right now Eric points out, but the wholesale option seems to be “Eric’s choice”.

Other considerations included selling more domain names than before by listing them with more brokers, setting up all his parked domains on minisites, and setting up real sites on his better domain names.

So, what did Eric do with his 9,000 domain names?

If you read through all the comments on the post, you’ll notice Eric is active and regularly responds to readers’ comments, even the not-so-nice ones.

You’ll also learn more about what he’s decided to do, that is, until selling all of his domain names to one buyer comes through. 

Eric doesn’t believe parking is the answer, and has no plans to let any of his names expire or sell any of them at registration fee.  “In terms of keeping vs selling my domains that make no money, the vast majority of my domains are worth at least a few hundred dollars each $500”, Eric writes.

Eric also states that he continues to get a high click through rate on Google Adsense ads, contrary to what many other domain investors are saying about their own domains.   

As far as his adult domain names, Eric is working with xpays.com: “A month ago I changed all my adult domains to be parked at xpays.com. They are not a parking company though, they put up a splash page giving the visitor some free content and then it tries to get them to signup for a free trial. I get paid $35 for each signup. Xpays has many different types of sites, and directs each of my domain to the best matching site of theirs. I switched my domains to their dns, so I did not have to do anything to set things up.”

Eric claims to have doubled his revenue using xpays, making nearly $2000/month from xpays with his 4,000 adult domains, rather than the $1000/month he was pulling in using traditional parking.

For Eric’s 4,000 non-adult domain names, he’s creating minisites using his own automated mass-development system he spent several months setting up.   Go to Inventing.com to take a look at an example of the mini site template that he is using across thousands of his domains. 

After all is said and done, Eric is still developing bigger web sites like Dumb.com and WatchMovies.com, and he’s still selling his domain names – with 2010 being one of his best years in terms of volume. 

Eric comments: ” Most years I think I have sold 30-50, but i am trying to accept more offers this year. I am not doing anything different to market them, and have never done any marketing other than listing them on Sedo.com and Afternic.com and on my own site at NameShopping.com.”

9 replies on “So what happened with Eric Borgos and his 9,000 domain names?”

Where does someone go to “mass-sell” their portfolio of names?   And what could someone expect to sell them for (percentage-wise vs. individually)?  Are there places that buy in bulk like that?  Dont say BuyDomains, that sleezy place will offer $5 to $10 for a $500 domain and then sell it on their service for $1888.   Fine for them but…..  So any other places out there?

Inventing.com has 1 page of actual content and a few pages with a video on them.  Using this strategy it is only a matter of time until he loses his Adsense account and his sites are banned in the Google SERPS.  Google doesn’t want 5 page minisites which really serve no purpose then trying to generate Adsense income for the owner.  There are many posts in forums talking about people who have lost their Adsense accounts this way.  Would expect more of an effort then a 1 page content site.

Great follow up Fuse.  Thanks for posting.  I have one adult domain recently acquired.  I’ll check out xpays.com.

Thanks for sharing, hopefully Eric stops by and reads this so he can tweak his sites as needed to stay within the TOS.

Why would my minisites voilate Adsense terms? The articles on my sites are all unique and custom written for me, and the games are all ones made by my programmer and all have the domain name in the intro of each game.

Made for Adsense sites (which tend to get banned) usually use articles and other content (photos, videos, news feeds, etc.) copied/syndicated from other sites, not unique content.

Well put, Eric.  I wasn’t sure what Chris was speaking about so I’m glad you chimed in.  Good luck with everything! All the best

There is a chance though Google (not Adsense) might delist my minisites because it erroneously considers them to be spammy, since I have so many on the same IP address and they are all setup pretty much the same.

Comments are closed.