Selling domain names

January 14, 2006 3:15 PM

I need to sell a good domain name for the highest price - fast. Where do I start?

Ebay or where?
Can somebody offer some advice, hopefully from personal experience, on the best places, method, copy, approach, to do it? Anybody willing to help me for a fee?

posted by growabrain to Computers & Internet (12 answers total)

SitePoint marketplace?
posted by ceri richard at 3:22 PM on January 14, 2006

haven't you missed that market? Do people still pay real money for domain names?
posted by mdn at 3:51 PM on January 14, 2006

GAB - Fast and highest price are usually mutually exclusive.

How good are we talking here? what ball park are you looking to net?
posted by FlamingBore at 4:03 PM on January 14, 2006

Just to make sure you realize, "for the highest price" and "fast" sort of work against each other. You have the advantage when you don't particularly need to sell -- you can wait for the right price to come along. If you want fast, you need to take the best offer of the people who happen to be looking at this particular moment. This can make a significant difference.
posted by winston at 4:37 PM on January 14, 2006

So I guess the question is: how fast?
posted by winston at 4:37 PM on January 14, 2006

Another good question is, what's the domain name?
posted by pwb503 at 5:14 PM on January 14, 2006

Ditto. You want to sell it, so it won't hurt letting us know that it's on the market.
posted by JamesMessick at 6:14 PM on January 14, 2006

You want to pay for an appraisal, and sell on Afternic.
posted by Jairus at 7:43 PM on January 14, 2006

Yeah, is there some reason you don't want to tell us the name?

Generaly names get sold when someone wants one, and they contact the owner.
posted by delmoi at 10:15 PM on January 14, 2006

Pay for a Featured Domain spot on sedo.com or afternic or one of the similar domain auction sites. And dnforum is supposed to be pretty good for this sort of advice. Another place you could try asking this question is in the domain name forum at WebHostingTalk.
posted by Meridian at 4:27 AM on January 15, 2006

Unless it's damn good *and* generic, you'll only get a good price if the exact right buyer comes along and really needs *that* name. So like everyone is saying, bide your time, or contact companies that might want that specific name to let them know it's available. I have a friend who happened to register his own stage name as a domain years ago. A new radio station in a major city decided to use his (rather generic) stage name as an identity (think "common first name+popular music genre") and came a' calling with five grand on the table last year. Chances of that happening to you? Slim as heck unless the name is short, sweet, a .com, and of very specific interest to a particular buyer.

I remember when people made serious money by squatting on cool, obvious domain names. That was a decade ago, at least. You now compete with folks who buy hundreds and hundreds of names and market them furiously, at fairly low prices.

That said, I just scored an amazing domain name I figured was gone for sure. There are still holes in the fabric.
posted by spitbull at 2:54 PM on January 15, 2006

This was an interesting article on domainers, people who make money by parking high traffic domains. They do buy popular domains on the auction sites.

Here's an adsense option from google on parked domains, I never knew about that one.
posted by jonah at 12:29 PM on January 19, 2006