leporello
Domaining Getting Out of Hand?
by
on 11-29-2010 at 03:27 AM (1066 Views)
As I recently posted over at GPWA, I've just started getting into a few non gaming niches in order to test the waters elsewhere. I've really enjoyed researching and building the sites thus far. It's been a welcome change of pace and has really served to refuel my interest and motivation in affiliating.
One thing that still shocks me is the incredible amount of domaining going on. We all know that gambling is a highly competitive (and profitable) niche, therefore it's no surprise that gambling domains come at a premium and that finding a decent unregistered domain is like finding a needle in a haystack.
I recently bought BestPokerRooms.com on PAL for 2k and in hindisght, I feel like i've gotten the bargain of the year. Some of the people I've emailed have been looking for 20k+ for three keyword exact matches with low volume. Madness.
While researching domain names in the niches and micro niches I was looking at, I found every single .com and .net under the sun was taken. In exact matches, with volume of 3k+ exact match searches, all the .orgs were taken too. Almost every fathomable brandable .com was taken - xxxguide, xxxzone, xxxplanet, xxxbluebook. Some of the names that have been registered are just insane. What I really don't understand is who is registering and holding onto these domains. Sure the ones with high exacts are obvious keepers in the hope that someone buys them for a premium price. But the brandable .coms for me will never have a value higher than maybe $50-$100 as planet or zone or whatever can easily be replaced with a different term. While it may not be quite as catchy, I think the prospective buyer will happily trade "less cacthY" for a saving of several hundred or more dollars.
On a final note, Matt Cutt's recently mentioned at Pubcon, that Google is going to look at exact match domains as he feels there may be a problem with them ranking too highly. While I don't think this will stop the ridiculous scale of domaining going on right now, hopefully it may help to slow it down.
What are your thoughts? Have you managed to pickup a decent domain recently?
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