I used to buy lots of domains, and still have lots that I am gradually letting slide as they come up for expiry - too much hassle for me when I have enough on my plate here. In the past you would buy domains on the chance that they would become valuable either for your own business or for someone else’s. But the advertising revenue model has completely changed that!

Domains are once again valuable and the resale market is ripe. www.freecreditcheck.com & www.creditcheck.com sold last month together for US$3 million and www.seniors.com sold for US$1.8 million and www.blogging.com raised US$135,000. Apart from Seniors which even after three weeks still has notification of the auction, these are all legitimate sites, and I recently read a very interesting article on Sitepoint on How to buy a operational website, do it up and resell it. In Queenstown someone is selling Driftnet.co.nz - a supposedly last minute booking service for NZD$5,000 that is not even fully operational.

But it is the advertising revenue model that is most interesting. Domains are being snapped up for both their names and their past trading history (in particular, how many links they have) to build Google Cost per click ad sites. Trust me, I know of one such entrepreneur making a pretty penny per month from a handful of pretty ordinary sites.

It is a fascinating model - not to mention the implications for SEO of buying strong page ranked domains with lots of links. Definitely something to look into!

Tags: Domain names

This entry was posted on Monday, July 2nd, 2007 at 9:06 am and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.