No big surprise here, but it looks like the folks over at Fiverr, the popular website that lets people sell gigs for $5, are the new owners of fiver.com.
Though the domain remains behind WHOIS privacy at GoDaddy, it recently started forwarding to fiverr.com, and the domain name is hosted on the same IP address.
Back in late May, Sedo reported the sale of Fiver.com for $70,000, which led to obvious speculation that Fiverr acquired the domain name.
Fiverr hasn’t garnered much attention in the news lately, and traffic to the site plummeted according to a rough estimate by Compete from 260,000 visitors in March 2011 to just 80,000 visitors a month later.
Considering the amount of traffic fiver.com was receiving before the acquisition (estimated in the thousands), it may have been just what Fiverr needed.
Fiverr.com, the internet site that lets people sell gigs for $5, has led to a number of clones in its short time online. Several scripts have also been created for webmasters to clone the popular business model. But as far as the clone sites that have been springing up on line in recent months, Fiverr.com still remains the model to beat in the micro-gig space, much like GroupOn has become the 800 pound gorilla in the group buying space.
Since transferring to its new owner in November, Zeerk.com has been listed twice more on Flippa, both ending in failed auctions. The most recent auction ended just over a week ago on January 13 after the listing failed to meet its reserve price. The highest bid came in at $19,000, far below its original purchase price of $52K.
These failed auctions are good examples of what high dollar sales reported at Flippa, don’t actually pan out. Even the alleged sale of Free-counter.com for $61,000 reported by domain blogger Morgan Linton, left his readers skeptical, given that the Flippa seller claims to make $8,000 a month in profit.
Zeerk.com: Why won’t it sell?
I’m no expert on this issue, but a quick glance at the comment threads on past listings reveals what Flippa users think about the auctions.
Why pay $50,000 or more for a website, when you can pay a couple hundred bucks (or less) for a clone script and get your own Fiverr-like site up in no time?
Others on Flippa, seem suspicious as to why the Zeerk.com owner is selling the site so fast, as the seller (who goes by TheGreatFX on Flippa) claims to have no time and to be leaving the country in which they live.
“Why are you selling the website within 2 months that sounds very fishy. Coming to USA does not make a big reason for selling it in 2 months timeframe”, writes Flippa user Negotiator.
While some suspect the site is plagued with problems and more question the site’s revenue and traffic claims.
Whatever happens with Zeerk.com on Flippa, I’m going to watch to see whether it goes up for sale again. Despite Zeerk running into a string of problems, the micro-gig space looks to have a lot of potential.
Fiverr.com, the website where people share things they’re willing to do for $5, attracted a lot of news coverage in 2010. The service which launched in February 2010, saw its traffic spike to over 400,000 unique visitors by March after a number of news sites and technology blogs like TechCrunch reported news of the start-up.
While Fiverr is just in time for a troubled economy, it’s nowhere near as popular as say, group-buying, despite Fiverr-clones already appearing online – a sign that a site is successful to some degree.
Fiverr for entrepreneurs
Owen Frager’s blog linked to an article by Dave Lavinsky’s article where he summed up the site’s success in a few lines: “This is a pretty simple concept and the site works very simply. I’m sure that the founders have thousands of ideas to make the site better (e.g., adding things that people will do for $25, etc.), but they started simply with the minimal viable product). Now, with success, they are adding more features (based on what customers are saying they want!). This is the formula for success.”
While thousands of people are making money selling their services for $5, it’s not just the usual internet marketers pitching gimmicks that are making money off the web site.
How are people making money off domain names?
A lot of Fiverr users are promising to find the best possible domain names that can still be hand-registered.
For example, here’s one seller that will give you five .com domain ideas that have Estibot values of at leat $100. For readers unfamiliar with Estibot, the website provides free domain appraisals, a somewhat tricky business with no perfect science.
I will give you 5 .com domain names that are available to be registered and that have Estibot values of at least $100. I have many years of domain name buying experience and can help you obtain quality domain names that are actually being searched for based on keywords. I own hundreds of domains and I buy and sell them on a regular basis.
I’m a master at finding high quality domains for people and organizations. I have dozens of sites myself that represent different projects -> thevoiceman.com, socialexpression.com, jvny.com, inspirology.com, smartmillion.com, processtoprofit.com, heartessentials.com and dozens more.
WordPress hosting, lists of typo domains, killer domain ideas, and much much more; there is definitely no lack of creativity by people selling domain services on Fiverr.
Use Fiverr’s search tool to see what gigs are being posted related to “domain names”, “seo” and other related services.
