Tag: millionaire

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Millionaire Eric Borgos racks up more domain sales; how they stacked up against appraisal tools

celeb gossip

Even if you watch the domain sales over at Sedo and other sales reported on NameBio, it’s always interesting to see what sales Big Time Domainers like millionaire Eric Borgos, a domainer who’s done it all, ends up selling his names for.  Eric might have sold internet properties in the millions, but he doesn’t hide the fact that several of his names sell in the $X,XXX and even lower. 

I stacked up Eric’s most recent sales to Valuate.com (powered by Estibot 2.0) and Estibot 1.0 (head-to-head) and Valuate (in our opinion) did a better job of squaring up the sales based on the actual sales price.

While this might sound a bit confusing, Valuate is POWERED by Estibot’s 2.0 Beta Engine – so the results are different when Valuate’s appraisals are compared to Estibot’s 1.0 Engine that is currently public.  So I thought looking at the varying appraisals would be worthwhile. 

I’ve decided to provide a little more clarification to this story thanks to one of our readers; since the versions of the Appraisal engines are different when you use the current version of Valuate.com up against the current version of Estibot.com.

While Estibot 1.0 can certainly make you feel better about your names, you might not always find a buyer willing to pay their appraisal values.  If you’re patient, it’ll pay off if you can land that buyer.  And who’s to say, with the right end user, you might even get more…

Everyone has their own way of dealing with things.  Some use Estibot’s 1.0 appraisal tool.  Some use Valuate.com (which for clarification, is powered by Estibot’s 2.0 Engine that is currently available at http://beta.estibot.com/).  Some even use fee-based appraisal sites (which we don’t recommend).  Others use their own market research.   And of course, there’s always your gut instinct.

But if you’re looking to make a sale that might attract more interest and close quicker, chances are the Valuate.com apraisal will fall more in line with market price — which ultimately is based on Estibot’s new BETA Appraisal engine.  Looks like Estibot has made improvements to their appraisal engine in v2.0, so the prices look more realistic for those looking to liquidate.

Here’s How Eric’s Latest Sales Stacked Up Against Valuate and Estibot 1.0

CelebGossip.com – $5000
Valuate.com Price: $9,500
Estibot Price: $42,000

FixErrors.com – $2000
Valuate.com Price: $2,600
Estibot Price: $6,500

MoneyListings.com – $1100
Valuate.com Price: $1,100
Estibot Price: $890

BeautyExpert.com – $3750
Valuate.com Price: $4,700
Estibot Price: $4,000

ResourceHome.com – $1000
Valuate.com Price: $85
Estibot Price:  $2,400

TowersCasino.com – $350
Valuate.com Price: $0
Estibot Price:  $260

NYCStudent.com – $250
Valuate.com Price: $220
Estibot Price:  USD reg fee

FindRates.com $5500
Valuate.com Price:  $570
Estibot Price: $2,700

TeenDays.com – $250
Valuate.com Price: $2,000
Estibot Price:  $670

AutoWizards.com – $750
Valuate.com Price: $160
Estibot Price:  $40

SportsFishermen.com – $1000
Valuate.com Price: $460
Estibot Price: $250

OxymoronList.com – $2500
Valuate.com Price: $380
Estibot Price: $110

4Mags.com – $750
Valuate.com Price: $530
Estibot Price: $90

ParentSavings.com – $1000
Valuate.com Price: $170
Estibot Price:  $1,100

BroadwayStage.com – $2000
Valuate.com Price: $1,900
Estibot Price:  $3,700

WickedLingerie.com – $1000
Valuate.com Price: $1,100
Estibot Price:  $7,000

CarInsuranceLeads.com – $1000
Valuate.com Price: $1,300
Estibot Price: $1,900

SecureDating.com – $2500
Valuate.com Price: $2,600
Estibot Price: $1,800

Other Related Tidbits

According to Eric, all the reported domains he sold he owned personally and most occurred after people looked up registrant information, then contacted him.

At the time of this posting, SecureDating.net and BroadwayStage.org are available for hand-registration.  BroadwayStage.net is a Premium name for sale at GoDaddy listed for $1,888.

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Eric Borgos who sold Bored.com for $4 million shares his experience with domaining partnerships

adopt me

Eric Borgos has been experimenting with different ideas, websites, and business models over the years including partnering with other individuals and organizations on his domain names. 

In a recent story on his company’s blog, Eric shares his experience with partnerships.  Although partnerships can be “sweet deals” as Rick Schwartz has proven, not all end up that way.

Before there was Webkinz, there was AdoptMe

Eric talks about Adoptme, a popular site he developed – and trying to get an AdoptMe Plush line of toys in stores:

In the end, I lost around $62,000, plus several years worth of time and effort working on it. The biggest problem was that my partners (some business friends of mine) took several years longer than expected to launch the toys and ran out of money, so I either had to finance them or scrap the project before we ever launched it, so I was pushed into financing it. I am still glad I did all of this though because it is not something I would have ever done by myself, and as evidenced by the huge success of Webkinz, it was a great idea.

Eric Invested almost as much time in FindRentals.com as Bored.com (which sold for $4 Million)

Eric also discusses the contrast between working on Bored.com and FindRentals.com – which he’s invested a lot of time and money into.

… it has grown year after year, at one point with a staff of around 25 people (many of them salespeople paid on commission). The site is a success, but I have not made any money from it so far. In the 9 years since we started FindRentals.com, I paid over $100,000 to my programmer to do work on it, plus monthly fees to the webhost, and I personally spent a huge amount of time working on it. I spent more time on FindRentals.com than any of my own sites, other than maybe Bored.com.

More lessons learned over at Impulse

Eric offers others lessons learned over at his company blog – including his experience with partnering on FindCash.com and Cyberworx.com.

Overall, Eric’s feelings on partnerships can be summed up by his opening statement:

I am not a big fan of partnerships. I know many big companies (Apple, Google, etc.) have been built that way, but it has never worked out very well for me. Many people don’t like partnerships because of potential personality conflicts or business decision making conflicts that come up and eventually ruin things, or because they don’t want to give up control of the business. But, those were not the problems I had. Almost every time, the problems I had came down to money.

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Every domainer wants to make it rich, how did Eric Borgos get millions? Bored.com, Dumb.com and more

Cheap Flowers

With pay-per-click revenue from 9,000+ domains like Orgasms.com and Inventing.com, 200+ websites like Dumb.com and Adoptme.com, and sales of names like Taboo.net and sales of websites like Bored.com – Eric Borgos has figured out how to make money and a living online.

How did Eric Borgos get rich online?

Even though Eric has made millions, he’s not sure about the answer.  But one thing’s for sure, he didn’t want to keep working for other people, and decided he could do things on the internet on his own.  According to Eric’s blog:

 Because I run my own Internet company, I often get asked the best way to make money online. Oddly enough, I have no good answer for that question. I was able to be successful mostly because I got in on the ground floor (back in 1995). I started by creating web pages for small businesses for $50-$100 each, plus I offered hosting for them. so I decided it was not worth the time and effort to convince people to create websites, just for the small amount of money I would make from it…

After a few years of being a web designer and web host, I saw all the sales my clients were getting from the pages I made for them and I decided I would be better off creating sites for myself instead. By then I had built up a portfolio of several hundred domain names, all of which were sitting there unused, so I decided to develop them.”

Registering Domain Names, and getting them on the drop

How did Eric get Bored.com – the name he ultimately developed and turned into a multi-million dollar sale?  He got it on the drop. 

Network Solutions used to take the domains back around 4am-5am (Eastern Time) each morning, so I would make sure to get up by then and frantically keep typing in my list of domains one by one to try to buy them. That is how I bought Bored.com. I would also sometimes find good domains that nobody ever registered before…

Developing websites from his domain names, entire networks of them

Eric learned early on that web development was key.  Listing links to relevant sites run by other people on Bored.com – Eric decided to build up his own network of sites and send traffic from his Bored.com hub, to his own sites – growing his own network and revenue.  Eventually, Bored.com was pulling in revenue of $35,000 / month, and traffic was growing to other sites. 

As the Internet grew in the early 2000’s, so did the number of visitors to Bored.com, and I was able to run ads from major ad networks such as DoubleClick. That increased income significantly, and I decided that instead of linking to other sites and giving them all the free traffic and ad income, I would be better off creating my own sites to link to instead.

Trying new ideas

Eric is completely honest about his success and his failures.  But most importantly, he writes on his blog, to try new ideas. 

…other than sites that were related to Bored.com, almost none of the sites I created or bought in the past few years made any significant money. This might be my fault, in that I didn’t promote them well, but I think it is much harder to get a good site noticed nowadays. That is not to say that there is not money to be made online though, because of course there are plenty of people who recently started sites that became successful. The good thing though that is is much easier, faster, and cheaper to start a website than it used to be. It is certainly worth trying any ideas you have, because you never know what will catch on.

List of sites

Alot of Eric’s sites receive thousands and thousands of visitors.  If you take a look at them, you might be surprised how simple some of them appear to look, but the niche they fill and the interest they draw, is no surprise.  Sites like CheapFlowers.com are businesses, not just content. 

Here’s a look at some of Eric’s sites.