In my opinion this is a huge problem on the internet. I am all for freedom to own domains, but it's coming to the point where more often or not the domain name I search for has no content up and is just conveniently being parked. For me, I guess the fact that the domain is parked tells me the owner is looking for a pay day from it, rather than to create their own content rich site. Big companies can force the little guy to submit to them and give them a domain, but little guys can't do anything to little or big guys to get a domain. It's a pretty messed up system.
I sold a domain once for $5,000(us) to the biggest equipment manufacturer in the world. I wanted more, their proposal was to buy it for $3,000(us). I was happy enough with the $5,000 after they told me they were going to sue and take it from me...
The domain system desperately needs reform. It's unconscionable that one can simply park domains wholesale and wait for the bids to roll in. It's a huge problem that people wanting to create value are held to ransom by parasites, and there is little chance other than to pay through the nose.
I know YC funded http://www.co2stats.com/ to "Green Certify" a website. "Fair trade" labels work for selling some higher-end products. I would probably lend my attention to advertisers and advertising networks that have some sort of "scum-free" label.
I don't see any solution in terms of mandates. Ignoring the difficulty (near-impossibility?) of adding certain mandates to registration, it would probably introduce bigger problems than it solved.
I do agree it's a problem though. Sometimes, it's actually pretty disgusting. I wanted to make a forum for people with an extremely rare type (300 US cases per year) of cancer that I had about a year back. The domain name that was the name of the disease was owned by a guy parking it. He wanted about 10k for it. The sad thing I don't think that is a crazy offer in the case of the domain name's present value from parking clicks. Medical terms are valuable...
...On the other hand, from a patient perspective, half those links were to websites peddling really bad and sometimes dangerous advice, in addition to the usual "Vitamin C will cure cancer" garage.
"I see empty storefronts in prime areas of SF all the time... I guess the owner's just looking for a big pay day."
Have you ever worked or owned commercial real estate? (I have).
They are looking for many things including what they feel is the right stable tenant that can pay the rent, keep the property in good condition, and has a good chance of staying in business.
Would you accept the first job offer from someone who offered you a job? If you were out of a job for 1 year would you take a job that you felt was beneath what your capabilities was?
Commercial real estate owners evaluate the market and what they can get for the property and many other factors.
You are being simplistic if you reduce this to "just looking for a big payday".
"It's unconscionable that one can simply park domains wholesale"
"unconscionable"?
It's a business model and it's legal. There is no requirement to use a domain name and there never has been one.
"people wanting to create value are held to ransom by parasites"
And what if the someone "wanting to create value" got to the name first and has their idea of a site is not as good as your idea of a site. The name would also not be available for you to use.
This idea that if people weren't parking names they would be available when you wanted the name is simply not true. Someone else could have registered the name and used it to put up 3 picture of their cat. Then you'd have to approach and buy it from them.
That said I can certainly understand the frustration that people feel in trying to obtain names for their startups (as I consult with these people).
It's a business model and it's legal. There is no requirement to use a domain name and there never has been one.
Notice that your response in no way addresses the grandparent's complaint. Being legal doesn't change the fact that parking domains makes you a bad person.
There are lots of things in this world that are technically legal to do, but make the world a worse place (domain squatting being a perfect example). There's also a type of individual that doesn't look beyond legality when determining right behavior. This is a good type of individual to be able to recognize, as it's a very good indicator of somebody with whom you never want to do business.
"Being legal doesn't change the fact that parking domains makes you a bad person."
Bad person?
Well then in that case since you are being so absolute about that you might want to resolve the dns for a domain that you own that isn't going anywhere. Even to a parking page.
DNS server handling your query: localhost
DNS server's address: 127.0.0.1#53
server can't find TWIDDLA.ORG: SERVFAIL
DNS server handling your query: localhost
DNS server's address: 127.0.0.1#53
I'm sure that's an oversight on your part? And you feel totally entitled to that domain name since you own twiddla.com and of course nobody could possibly want the .org could they?
Parking a domain makes somebody a bad person? How is this any different than a speculator buying undeveloped parcels of land and waiting for a developer to come along and buy them for more money? Are they bad people, too?
It is annoying when you need to buy the domain you want from a reseller and have to pay more than if it wasnt registered, but saying it makes the reseller a bad person is going way, way too far.
You're seriously asking what the difference is between a domain name and a piece of land? It would be easier to list the ways in which they're similar.
Domain squatting makes the Web suck. It does. You can throw around all the analogies you want, but speculative investment does not have the same effect. The domain name system was not designed to be used that way. If there were a special squatter registration that cost an exorbitant amount per domain, then maybe I'd say it's fine because they would have to make an actual calculated purchase to justify the obscene prices. But as it is, they're abusing a vestigial weak spot in the Web's infrastructure.
To my mind a domain and a business premises are extremely similar in these respects - case in point, my city is suffering at the moment as there are huge gaps in the high-street with no open shops. High-street rentals are still massively high. There's very little way for even the big chains to make a profit off such high-street locations. But the rent won't go down because the owners consider that even if they're vacant it doesn't matter as the value of the premises has risen 100% over the last decade or so - eventually they can cash out if they want to, or eventually a business will want to move in paying full rent (they think; I think they're trying to cure a lame horse by hacking at it's good legs with an axe ...).
Both business real-estate and domains suffer the same problem here IMO; people want to acquire wealth without effort. Singling out domainers is unfair - but criticising the same sort of activity everywhere is something that won't pull a complaint from me ...
OK, I'll accept for the sake of argument that domain names and buildings are very similar. The thing is, nobody can afford to buy thousands of storefronts that they don't plan to use except to extort people who aren't as cynical. Domainers are exploiting the cheapness of domain names, which is not a weakness that physical property generally shares with the Web. If domain names cost, say, $500 per year, I suspect you'd wind up with an economy much more closely resembling a functioning real estate market.
>nobody can afford to buy thousands of storefronts //
For sure. But plenty of people (hidden behind corporations) have bought up 10s of store-fronts.
If domain names cost $500 per year to keep from the registry then this would find an equivalence in a piece of real-estate being taxed at around 40x the annual rent per year.
Those wealthy enough to be in real estate in my country have in many cases made more money sitting on their arses for a couple of years than I expect to make in my whole lifetime. You can literally sit on a piece of unwanted real estate if you have sufficient capital and wait to see if it accrues added "value". Sure you may have to pay some legal fees occasionally but all you really need do is be wealthy in the first place. You're buying a scarce resource that, provided you can take a long view and aren't forced to sell at a particular time, will almost certainly not decrease in value.
Now, domaining is the same. But here the scarcity is dubious as the registries can alter that whenever they want to print some more money for themselves. Buy-in is a lot less costly but predicting the upside appears to be concomitantly more difficult.
Most people domaining don't have sufficient capital to do it right or are to late to the market. But I don't see how this changes the underlying similarity. The same is true in real estate.
> Being legal doesn't change the fact that parking domains makes you a bad person.
Typically this is said by those that wished they had gotten in a bit earlier...
As for getting domain names: it doesn't matter what product or project I come up with it takes me 15 minutes to come up with a reasonably good domain name. I really don't see the 'shortage' as being anywhere near as bad as it is.
What you'd like to see is that you could take away domain names from their current registrants because you will be a 'better steward' of them. But who will stop that domain name being taken away from you? What do you propose will be a good standard for being developed? Should there be a time limit? Will you have to pay fair value for the domain? Should it go back to the registry and be re-registrable immediately and how will you make sure that only 'good persons' will get those domains?
Really, you make a pretty heavy accusation and I fail to see what you could do to either improve the situation or how you would avoid being a 'bad person' yourself if you had a good domain name you registered in the past that you currently have no use for.
I'm openly confirming here that I have upwards of 500 domains registered and have developed only a small fraction of those, but at the same time when I registered them I fully intended to use them in one way or another, the lack of time and hands to carry out all my wild ideas is what prompted me to put the larger chunk of them up for sale.
It seemed pretty clear to be that Jason was talking about squatters — that is, people who intentionally buy domain names just to exploit the low actual cost of a domain name for greedy purposes. If you buy a domain name and just have trouble getting around to using it, you're maybe a bit disorganized, but you're not intentionally screwing somebody over. But if you buy a domain name because you think it's likely somebody will be willing to pay a ridiculous price later and in the meantime you can park it and leech money from unsuspecting visitors, yeah, I find that morally questionable too.
It's like the difference between an old person getting lost and wandering into somebody's kitchen and a thug busting in with a gun and demanding money. Technically they're both invading the kitchen, but there is an important qualitative difference both in their actions and the effects they have on people.
(BTW, I accidentally downvoted you when I was trying to scroll. Sorry about that. Although I disagree with you, I do appreciate hearing your point of view.)
You think there is a similarity in some way shape or form to an illegal act like a thug invading someone's kitchen and someone who legally registered a domain name (even with the intent to sell it) a totally legal capitalistic move (which is similar to buying real estate in order to resell it or buying something off craigslist and reselling it on ebay for higher money) and breaking the law?
The law is very clearly defined with regards to filing a UDRP or a federal cybersquatting lawsuit in order to recover a domain name. Outside of the specific areas that are covered (by those) there has never been any intent to prevent anyone from registering a domain name who intends to profit from selling those domain names. Any more than there has ever been a law to prevent anyone from buying anything in order to resell at a higher price (providing it doesn't break any laws.)
I can't help but feel that you're ignoring what people are saying here.
Nobody is claiming it's illegal†; we're saying it's bad. You can repeat that the law is on your side till the cows come home, but it won't make a difference because nobody is arguing that. I agree that it's legal, but that doesn't mean it isn't harmful to the Web at large. Some forms of predatory lending are legal (and even more were legal in the past), but they are nonetheless seen as a slimy business. Nobody other than a prosecutor cares if a loan shark can legally justify what he does — people dislike loan sharks because they take advantage of others and act in a way that is generally harmful to society, not because the law happens to be against them at some particular point in time.
And to be clear, I am not trying to attack you or Jacques personally here. I know that even if you weren't doing it, there are plenty of others who still would. Regardless, I feel very strongly that this industry hurts the Web as a whole. It functions in a way that's reminiscent of a protection racket, or the kind of corruption that's endemic in the Chinese government.
† Granted, in the "thug with a gun" analogy, that act was illegal, but the point was that a confused old lady trespassing is also illegal. It's not the binary state of legal or illegal that makes the big difference there, but the ill intent and the harm done. The people being robbed wouldn't feel better if the thug with a gun were working for a loan shark who happened to be operating under a legal technicality.
In the area of trademarks I believe, you need to demonstrate that you are not just "parking" the name but also actually taking actions to sell and market the product/service. A similar regulation should be applied for websites to ensure they are using it for the proposed purpose.
There is precedent for this in WIPO court (around abusing domain parking), but unfortunately the shady businesses that profit off of parking domains are getting smarter by auto-generating "specialty based news services" based on the keywords in the URL instead of throwing up exclusively ads. Take for example, the World News Network which squats domains with pages like "http://policearrest.com/. (See an example WIPO proceeding here http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2005/d2005...)
World New Network had squatted a domain that we were interested in (a gobbledegook web 2.0 name, mind you), and they wanted 80k under the idea that this website was an important part of their news operation. If this was an English word it might make sense, but it was far from it so the whole game reeked of extortion (in the casual, not legal, sense).
I completely agree. Something to keep in mind is that the domain name system is almost unlike any other commodity -- in that only one of each exists, and it can never be replicated.
For example, no matter how rare a baseball card is, there is almost always a few others of its kind. Same with comic books, and so on. Now, no matter how rare an antique piece of furniture is (let's say it's a one-off, hand-made piece), you can still replicate it with enough attention to detail to nearly fully mimic the original.
But, with a domain name, there's only one. And, you can't mimic it. (You can get the .co, but that's a whole other story.) Consequently, domain owners have a lopsided amount of haggling power.
As both you and I already hinted at, you can get a name in a different TLD (or even prepend "get", e.g. "getAPP.com"), but you're taking a hit for a variety of reasons (perception, confusion). My point was only that you won't ever replicate it, and for that reason domains are unique.
My personal favorite "fallback" is to use .io or prepend "get."
But I would absolutely stay away from any cctld's like .io. If your site becomes popular you will end up having to purchase the .com assuming you even can do that. (Once publicity of your .io site gets out the price of the .com will go up if it's even possible to buy).
One side of the problem is that "only one of each exists", the other is that many entities might 'need' (more or less) this very name, regardless whether we talk about local (eg. 3 bookstores in one small town) or worldwide.
I imagine with system (resources on the internet) getting bigger and bigger single, nice, short and memorable domains will gradually become less important.
I imagine factors like location aware, user aware, use of bookmarks, search, links attached to social profiles, NFC, qr, AI algorithms, you name it, will each play a role here.
There could be moment in time when everybody will accept change of 'paradigm' and accept that addressing resources is not the way it used to be, or that it is 'many ways lead to the content' . We could even use bare numbers for lots of stuff.
Also, this reminds me that people used to share domains back in 90's with a nice intro and screen split to two parts - you would choose which company/site you wanted to go. Sure its not the solution by any means, but I liked those sites, always getting some positive feeling that this was possible (people agreeing on sth). I have not seen such a site for a long time, though.
Art and people (sports, movie starts) are two I thought of instantly. And the insane, somewhat arbitrary (although it's always whatever someone is willing to pay) pricing of those makes domain market look clean and efficient.
The comparison of domains to sports and movie stars (when it comes to being un-replicable and heavily influenced by taste) is very interesting. Maybe I'll start telling people that domains are like movie stars :)
An interesting question that then arises is what would be the equivalent of "character actor" in the domain world?
There are lots of tlds available now. If one cannot find hisname.com, he should go for .biz, .info, .net, .org, .in, .name, .me or any of the extensions that are available for anyone to register. I'm sure hisname will be available in one of these extensions.
Problem is, people feel entitled to own the .com name just because they have an idea that they think can change the world. If the idea can change the world, then the tld should not matter (or even the domain name should not matter).
The title is "How to Acquire a Domain Name (That Someone Already Owns)"
But the article essentially deals only with how to contact the owner.
It doesn't deal at all with strategy or research required to acquire a domain name at a fair price.
Acquiring a domain name is much more than contacting the owner. It's how you contact the owner and what you say and even how you say it. And who you appear to be and a host of other factors. It's what your initial offer is (and while some will say don't make the first offer that is not always correct) and even how long it takes you to reply to a counter or how that is handled.
There is much to the strategy (on both buy and sell side).
And even if you are using an intermediary to make offers on your behalf you will have to use a strategy with them as well.
That was the purpose of linking to the Fred Wilson blog post comment. It covers almost everything you just mentioned. This post is an outline for others to handily reference.
I've acquired 2 or 3 registered domains in my life, so not that much experience. However, I get the feeling that people dare to ask more money when they have time to think about it, ie. acquiring via email. When I acquired my first domain, I didn't email, but simply called the person up. Worked like a charm!
Quick pitch: I've been building a new domain search tool called Lean Domain Search [1] that makes it really, really easy to find great available .com domain names. You type in a word and it pairs it with 1,400 other words and instantly shows you which are available (and I'm adding 100 results per week). The number of available search results is now almost at 700.
Unless you are dead-set on having a specific name, there's no reason you should have to pay more than the $12 registration fee to pick up a decent domain name for your next site.
I'd even go so far as to say that as word of Lean Domain Search spreads (it's less than 5 weeks old), it will have a major impact on the premium domain name market for this very reason. There's this perceived scarcity of good domain names that simply doesn't exist. You just need a tool like LDS to show you.
I used LDS recently when picking out a domain. It was good, but the results often felt a SEO-like (e.g. "bestof<x>"). I found I was doing a lot of manual work separating the wheat from the chaff.
I ended up creating a text file of base words, prefixes and suffixes (built partially from LDS suggestions) which I fed through another site that combined them into domains I could query in batches of 225.
I felt this was something your site could have easily automated by letting me flag prefixes/suffixes I liked and allowing me to suggest multiple base words.
lds is a good tool and I've just used it to recommend names to people last week.
That said selling names to startups is only one channel for domain names. So I wouldn't say the impact is going to "major".
Also mainstream name buyers tend to search through premium domains at godaddy or type in a name and may see a for sale page that leads to buydomains etc.
A simple solution for the vast majority of domain squatting: just charge a "property tax" of $100/year per domain. That's not an outrageous amount for a real user, but it makes the "buy a zillion domains and park them until the Big One comes along" business model no longer mathematically sound.
Any organization that's sufficiently large they don't care about the small incremental income. That is, anybody who's not a domain registrar.
I'm not a U.S. citizen, but the U.S. federal government would fit the bill just fine, and would be the obvious (though inevitably controversial) group to do it for .com, .net, and .org, ie. the problematic ones.
What about domains that are not business specific, but personal? For example, there is a squatter who registered a huge number of firstnamelastname.com -- one of which is my real name. He's been reregistering it for the past 8 years.
I created a fake email several years ago and made up some cover story about how I was looking to create an online persona to blog with and listed 5-6 domains of these domains. The squatter wanted 10k for my firstnamelastname.com when I offered less than he wanted (like 1k) for one of the domains I really didn't want, he just said no and stopped responding. I even cited a post where he paid $80 for the domain...
I've been afraid to interact with the guy using my real name and the domain I actually want because I don't want to show any interest in the domain in hopes he just lets it expire.
((The guy has also had several domains seized by ICANN))
One option that was left out is to wait for it to drop and buy it then. You can use a service to try to catch it when it drops but you then enter into a bidding match, or you can just wait for it to be completely released. Obviously more risky and maybe not worth the risk but I've done it recently.
The domain I wanted was 4-5 weeks away from expiring, so I read a bit on the services to catch it when it drops and some sounded a bit fishy (some claim they put fake bids to pump the price up…). So I took a chance and waited the whole expiration process and was lucky enough to get it for just the price of a domain.
Granted, it wasn't one of these unique four-letter domains so there was a decent chance there'd be little interest, and I would have survived without it (I had bought a good back-up name), but it's still an option for the cheap and patient…
Parked domains are an investment, and I suspect this is the kind of business that is only profitable on the long tail - you only flip some exceedingly small percentage of your total inventory on a given year, but you can't tell ahead of time which ones are going to be the winners.
So… unless these are all manually managed (which I find unlikely, doesn't GoDaddy have a whole panel dedicated to parking?) I find this scenario to be extremely unlikely.
Someone who has actually parked domains can probably shed some more light on the business model involved.
"Someone who has actually parked domains can probably shed some more light on the business model involved."
...you answered your question perfectly:
"I suspect this is the kind of business that is only profitable on the long tail - you only flip some exceedingly small percentage of your total inventory on a given year, but you can't tell ahead of time which ones are going to be the winners."
Exactly.
That said much of this also has to do with who owns the name, whether they need the money (what you are offering) and a host of other factors to numerous to mention.
As a general rule though I would rather be making an offer to buy a name off someone who owns a vast inventory of names than someone who owns only a few. Why? Because they know that if they pass up your offer they might wait another 7 years to sell that name. So essentially you just have to clear a certain point based on their experience and the names is yours.
Unless of course that person who owns only a few names needs money in which case (well you get my point) I'd rather have that person be the seller.
From my experience I've seen all sorts of things happen. I just helped a startup get a great name for a few hundred dollars that was worth much more simply because the owner didn't even google to see that they obviously would need the name.
That comment is perfect. I'm a developer that loves buying domain names that strike a chord. I'll get to that idea one day! I get approached a few times a year and the author touched on a lot of feeling a seller goes through when being approached via email. I've ignored a few requests because I can tell the prospective buyer is not serious. I'd be much more likely to "think" about a serious offer in an initial email.
Domain owners behind WHOIS privacy are not necessarily unreachable. The privacy service has to offer some way of contacting those domain owners by proxy, so you may just have to fill out a web form behind a CAPTCHA to get your message across.
I did this for a domain a few weeks ago that was using OpenSRS' WHOIS privacy (via http://contactprivacy.com) and while it took 2 weeks for the owner to get back to me, he responded by putting the domain up on Sedo so I could make an offer on it.
When I want to buy a domain, I use Who.Is to find the owner and send a certified FAIR value through Escrow.Com
Unfortunately, when people contact me to obtain a domain I have, I get very lowball offers - to which I do not respond.
I also offer people to use my domains for Free as part of my project OpenDomain, but most people insist that they must own the domain. I guess they do not get that we are "Open Source for domains".
Open source for domains means nothing to me, what are you to domains? I have no way of linking open source in my mind to the concept of domains.
I tried to look what OpenDomain was so I search and I find some business solutions .com which I assume isn't your project so I look and I find your twitter[1] (I'm assuming) which has the same slogan you used, so I go to the website and what do I find? Just some default filler content for whatever template your purchased.
Owning the domain for a project or a company is key as that is a great part of their identity that they have to build up (especially for online applications). Maybe if your project "OpenDomain" gets some backing and is alive for many years and actually says what it does then maybe people won't have to own their domains but as of now your complaint of people not getting it is moot.
Has anyone had any experience acquiring a name that's being squatted on? Our nonprofit has the .org for a domain; a squatter has the .com. We'd like to get it from them so we don't have confused users.
Should we write them first? Have our lawyer write nicely? Sternly? Or just skip this and go straight to UDRP?
I got a voicemail last week from an LA area number. It was a cute-sounding girl saying, "Hi, my name is Kayla, I'm taking a marketing class, and for one of my projects I wanted to use your domain xxx dot yyy, so I was wondering if you would sell it to me. Ok, please call me back!"
I'll repost the good part here, since it isn't attributed anyway:
The Art Of Negotiating A Domain Name Purchase
I see so much bad advice about how to approach someone to buy their domain... "contact them and say I see you're not using xxxxx.com, I have a little project I'd like to use it for... would you be willing to let it go?" etc. etc. etc. HORRIBLE ADVICE.
People that are sitting on domain names don't keep paying the registration fees every year for fun, even if they aren't using the name. They know it has value. So don't insult their intelligence making them think they should do you a favor by letting you have their unused domain.
Many Domain Owners Think They're Sitting On A Lottery Ticket
Many domain owners think that one day someone is going to come along and give them millions for their .Com no matter what it is. The fact is, domains are only worth what someone is ready to hand you a check for. (A tip to all you wannabe speculators.) I've seen many GREAT domains never get sold, so always keep that in mind. Anyway, because domain owners have this thinking, they are very reluctant to NAME A PRICE. So forcing them to start by naming a price isn't something they want to do, because they're hoping YOU offer some ridiculously high price that they will then counter to go much higher.
Because of this, you MUST start out on first contact with an offer (more on this in a second). The approach of "would you be willing to sell xxxxx.com? If so, how much?" isn't going to cut it; one of the main reasons is that domain owners of decent domains get TONS of emails all the time asking them that, and when they've replied in the past with a price or try to start negotiations so many people are only willing to pay $100 or some insulting price.
So what do most domain owners do? IGNORE YOU. That's right. So if you've ever contacted a domain owner after looking them up with a Whois search and they didn't reply, it's not because they didn't your email (which makes you think that follow-up fax or phone call will do the trick; HINT: it won't.) It's because they think you're like everyone else that thinks they can buy the domain for $100 or so.
Here's how you get their attention and get the ball rolling...
Rule #1: You must start out by making an offer in your initial email.
Rule #2: This offer must be high enough to get their attention and make them at least THINK.
NOTE: Rule #2's amount will depend on how great the domain is.
The two magic price points I have found that work the best (they depend on how valuable the domain is) is either $1,000 or $2,500.
If it's a great domain then $5K-$10K is usually the starting point. These amounts are enough to get anyone's attention. I've bought many $100K+ value domains for $15K-$20K by starting with a $5K or $7K offer.
By starting with at least something that gets their attention they will take you seriously. This is the first step or you have no chance to make a deal.
In most cases for decent 2 words domains, the $1K to $2.5K opener works best.
* TIP: Always know your seller if possible. Do a Whois on who owns the domain, visit the domain in their email address or do some Google searches, etc. You'll often find a struggling Web designer is sitting on a great domain. $1,000 cash to that person is a lot of money. So this also goes into the process of deciding what to open the offer with.
The key here is not to insult someone with a lowball offer, but offer enough to make them know you're a serious buyer.
So here's a sample initial contact email to send... (and I'll explain the rest of the language I use)...
Subject Line: Whatever.com ($2,500?)
Hi,
I see you are the owner of Whatever.com. I'm in the process of trying to find a domain name for a client I am building a web site for and think your name could be a good fit. I am contacting different domain owners as we have it in the budget to buy a cool name and Whatever.com is on the list we came up with.
Would you be interested in selling it for $2,500?
Let me know and I can have the funds wired to you next day or PayPal'd to you. Just let me know your PayPal address.
Thanks for your time.
-YOUR NAME
-------------------------
Let's breakdown why I used that language...
1. You've positioned yourself as not the future 'owner' of the domain. You're just managing a budget for a project. This helps because as they will usually counter with a higher amount, you'll play the "sorry, I just don't have it in the budget to go that high" to work towards a price you want. You'll also be able to play the "let me see if the client can approve a budget increase to accommodate that price" etc. etc. This also allows you to play Good Cop, Bad Cop in a way. You're just someone trying to get the deal done to do your job (build the site). You're also presenting yourself as someone LESS EMOTIONALLY INVESTED IN THE NAME -- which will potentially keep the price down. (Trust me, it works very well.)
2. You mention that you're contacting several domain owners (i.e. making multiple offers). You're playing up SCARCITY, one of the most powerful emotions when it comes to sales. For all this person knows they could reply and say "okay, I'll sell it" but you may come back and say, "sorry someone replied to our email first and now we have a domain."
3. By closing with the "we'll pay you right away" it makes the offer more REAL. Many of these domain owners get offers that people back out of and have no intention to actually pay. And you're also ASSUMING THE SALE by saying, "what's your PayPal address?" :-)
Again, all of these things are very, very powerful and I have tweaked this initial contact email over the years.
ADDITIONAL TIPS
Let's say you initially offer $2,500 on a great name and the owner counters with, "I couldn't sell it for that, I've had higher offers. I would never sell it for anything less than $10K."
FIrst, you must IGNORE anything they say. You'll get the "I've turned down higher offers" response a lot. In the example response about $10K above, unless you would love to have it for $10K, just reply with something like this... "While I do think your name is possibly worth $10K to someone, we just don't have the budget for that much, sorry. I could probably get something more like $5K-$7K approved, but even that's pushing it. Anyway, thanks for your time."
That's it. Cut them off. Trust me, they'll come back to you 90% of the time. Sometimes you just have to be a little PATIENT and you'll save a fortune. Remember to always play up the SCARCITY. "That's just too much for our budget... looks like we'll just go with an alternative name that we've been negotiating for a lot less, even though we preferred your name. Thanks for your time and at least trying to work something out." That's NOT what they want to read from you. ;-)
There are THOUSANDS of amazing domain deals out there waiting to happen. I, personally, buy domains all the time this way. In fact, this is probably a good time to negotiate some deals as many people need the cash more than in recent years.
FINAL TIP: It's not uncommon to settle on a final price that is 30% of what their original asking price was. Keep that in mind as a general rule of thumb. I've had many deals for great names where someone "really wanted $60,000" and we closed the sale around $20K.
That's some great advice. It is fun to read both sides. I've been on both quite a bit as a buyer and a seller and this is some of the best advice I've seen out there for approaching.
However, I will point out one thing I disagree with.
" The fact is, domains are only worth what someone is ready to hand you a check for. (A tip to all you wannabe speculators.) I've seen many GREAT domains never get sold, so always keep that in mind."
Almost. A lot of those truly valuable names have type in traffic which can be monetized (those landing pages full of links you always see) and can actually make decent money. So when your offer doesn't line up with the expected income stream of the domain over time, it doesn't matter how long I wait to sell it. It earns money every day, every month, every year.
Of course, most domains don't earn anything or get any real type in traffic.
It's also funny to watch the evolving arms race of owners vs buyers and the tactics used. It's constantly changing and people are improving on both sides. If a bunch of people start using this exact template, domainers are going to look at this and try and take you for more. Figure out this exact play (it's not all that unique). Domainers holding really good stuff know how to wait indefinitely for a buyer. Some of these guys have been doing it for over a decade. One lost sale may not fit into their business model of getting super high prices when they own 5000, 50000 or 500000 names.
> So when your offer doesn't line up with the expected income stream of the domain over time, it doesn't matter how long I wait to sell it. It earns money every day, every month, every year.
This is very true.
Also: one domain sold for the right price makes up for a decade of fees for 100's or even thousands of domains.
Yup. For the big guys it's purely a numbers game. You may not pay 5k, 10k, 100k, but someone will, for some of their names and with a big enough portfolio. It will work out assuming some minimum level of quality. Parking revenue is just icing on the cake.
> I can have the funds wired to you next day or PayPal'd to you
NO. DON'T DO THIS.
Always use an escrow service. I didn't and I got scammed by no one else but a fellow startup founder. The amount wasn't great, $400, but that left an awful aftertaste that is hard to describe.
Wow good catch. I missed that part totally since I was making a point about not making any reference at all to payment (most people write using escrow.com) since it makes it sound as if you know to much. I completely missed something that I would never do that is obvious.
That said I've had people wire me money (but I've got a traceable reputation etc.)
I won't take credit cards or paypal (when selling) because of the potential for chargebacks.
"That's it. Cut them off. Trust me, they'll come back to you 90% of the time."
90%! Simply not correct. Not even close.
And this:
"If it's a great domain then $5K-$10K is usually the starting point. These amounts are enough to get anyone's attention. I've bought many $100K+ value domains for $15K-$20K by starting with a $5K or $7K offer."
Bullshit artist. By "100k+" names does he mean he bought many names he sold for 100k+ for 15 to 20k? Or that he values them at 100k+ (when he tries to sell them).
"Let me know and I can have the funds wired to you next day or PayPal'd to you. Just let me know your PayPal address."
Wrong advice when writing to many sellers. Sounds like you know the business. If you are trying to buy a domain from someone else in the business they will wonder why you are offering to buy it to them (and then know you have to mark up the domain as well).
They give a course on negotiation to people being promoted to upper management in the multinational I work for. The first rule is that if you quote first, you lose, because you are setting your worst case.
I strongly suspect all of what is written in your comment is aimed at boosting the market for domain names, because you own lots. There are so many good domain names available (http://blog.nametoolkit.com/domain-names-taken), that the only reason you would buy one in the secondary market is because you are already trading under that name in real life.
What famous site do we know of that bought its domain in the secondary market?
> They give a course on negotiation to people being promoted to upper management in the multinational I work for. The first rule is that if you quote first, you lose, because you are setting your worst case.
Including an offer in the first contact is essential. Without it, I won't even reply to your email or return your phone call, no matter how many times you follow up (without an offer). I don't want to sell my domains, but I'll take any serious offer under consideration.
Another tip: Don't play dirty. I caught someone trying to initiate a transfer on one of my domains without my knowledge. Naturally, it failed. Out of spite, I snapped up the .net and .org counterparts, which were still available. If it weren't for that dick move, I probably would have pointed out that they were there for the taking.
"Without it, I won't even reply to your email or return your phone call, no matter how many times you follow up (without an offer)"
So you are saying that if someone wrote to you from a corporate address at General Electric ge.com you wouldn't reply to an inquiry if they didn't make an offer?
And taking that one step further that person who is a serious buyer could be masking their identity behind a gmail account.
I think it's a mistake not to reply to an email. Even if just to say "not for sale make offer" or whatever you want to say.
Many times brokers (who have valid buyers with money) are inquiring. If they don't get a response they will move on.
Just my perspective I'm a big believer in always responding.
Since I'm not in the business of parking domains and have no interest in selling the domains I have, the onus is on the prospective buyer to get me interested. I routinely get inquiries about my domains, and most of them are so one-sided and cagey, it's obvious they'll be a waste of my time. Not everyone feels the way I do, but if you want to buy a domain someone already owns, it doesn't hurt to start with a serious offer from a real address with full contact details.
Slashdot chose to run the .org as their main domain. If they had bought the .com the .org would never have been worth as much as it was in the reverse case.
My point is that for a while, somebody ran a .com which put .org in an iframe and put advertising above it.
If Slashdot had owned the .com, it wouldn't have happened.
An Australian example is crikey.com.au, who for years were troubled by people referring to them as crikey.com -- in print media, on TV, even in Hansard.
No offer in the first email goes straight into the trash. Just another data point for you.
No real name of person making offer: ditto.
Joe Smith from randomemail at gmail.com which I can't google for: ditto.
In other words, if you start by playing games you likely are not serious anyway and there is no point wasting time.
An email from a real person (sorry to all the Joe Smiths in the world) with an established reputation accompanied by a non-insulting offer will always get a response, even if it is a polite 'sorry, not interested'.
I understand that's your reaction and that's fine. But as you put, that's just "another data point". Not every domain owner is like that - I got good results using this approach, often with a "Sure, I'd like to sell, my price is $number".
My point is - even if you get no response for the first email, since you didn't send it from your real address, you can always send a second one, and you can send it "as youself", and make an offer right away - as soon as you get an idea of what kind of seller you're dealing with.
I agree with everything except revealing your identity. Often seen sellers hike prices when they know you can afford it/ you need it badly/ etc. when we were looking at domains to buy in Microsoft, we were told to never access it from the corporate network since sellers had hiked prices dramatically when they knew it was Microsoft on the other end.
Sad, but I totally see a case for hiding your identity or going through another entity - brokerage, low-cost lawyers, etc.
You should also have an idea of what the market value of your desired name is, try reviewing sites like www.namebio.com to get an idea of past domain sales.
If you want to buy a domain somebody owns, just get the email address from the WHOIS and send them a quick note, 'are you interested in selling this domain?'. Response rate from this is > 80%. Payment always via Escrow.com (PayPal does not provide protection for domains) and you're set.
As to the discussion of whether domain parking should be allowed, think of it like real estate. Those who own vast tracts of land may develop it, they may sell it or they may just sit on it for the rest of their life and pass it to their heirs. Premium domains are exactly the same.
I sold a domain once for $5,000(us) to the biggest equipment manufacturer in the world. I wanted more, their proposal was to buy it for $3,000(us). I was happy enough with the $5,000 after they told me they were going to sue and take it from me...