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Living On Domaining?

DavidL

Top Contributor
Hey what happened to the post - I was going to comment on it. I remember you asked a question about whether .au or .com were best to focus on...

In my view .com's are a terrible investment at the moment. 5 years ago, maybe but I believe they have pretty much done their dash & ccTLDs are where the growth is. Sales figues seem to back this up too:

Exhibit A - manually extracted from DNJournal reported sales:

Below I'm using the median of the top 100 reported sales for each category. Rather than extract all the com's from the all sales charts, I'm being simplistic & using the All Sales chart as a measure of com values (after all these charts are dominated by .com sales)

Year.......Com Sales .... ccTLD Sales

2006.......$125K........ $13K
2007.......$200K ....... $21K
2008.......$188K ....... $26K
2009.......$141K ....... $37K

So, if you'd have invested in a bunch of typical .com names in 2006 and sold them in 2009, you'd have made a lousy 12% over those 3 years. Invested the same money in a broad selection of ccTLDs and you've nearly tripled your money

Exhibit B - Ron Jackson's analysis of 2009 sales

http://www.dnjournal.com/newsletters/2010/january.htm

Total Reported Domain Sales Dropped 12.5% in 2009 But ccTLD Sales Soared 28% Over the Previous Year

Exhibit C -Sedo's annual report

http://sedo.com/fileadmin/documents/pressdownload/2009_Market_Study.pdf

2007 the average .com sale on Sedo was $5,016
2008 the average .com sale on Sedo was $2,512
2009 the average .com sale on Sedo was $1,829
 

mreddie

Regular Member
I've done very well out of .com's in the past and now. I have some .com.au investments but they don't come close to the earning potential of .coms. I understand the median price has dropped, but for a keen eye there is still lots of money to be made.
 

DavidL

Top Contributor
I've done very well out of .com's in the past and now. I have some .com.au investments but they don't come close to the earning potential of .coms. I understand the median price has dropped, but for a keen eye there is still lots of money to be made.

For a keen eye there's lots of money to be made in ANY industry. Investing in .com's today would require a much keener eye than in ccTLDs is my point.

I've yet to meet anyone who has made any decent money investing in .com's in the last few years despite the 10's of thousands of people who have tried to do just that.
 

Simon Johnson

Top Contributor
I've yet to meet anyone who has made any decent money investing in .com's in the last few years

I have a similar view on this. While I understand the question was around .com investment, I'd note that there are quite a few serious full-time domainers. I'm talking about people like myself whos full-time job it is, to make $$$ from domaining. (As opposed to working for a vendor or running a conference on Domaining).

IMHO - it really depends on what you mean in terms of investing. There are many people who dabble in it or perhaps sell a keyword .com for 6 figures and live off the interest...... then there is development (my preference).

There are still lots of bargains in com/net/org, you just have to look.
 

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