[thelist] Domain Pricing

Green, Janet JGreen at DesMoinesMetro.com
Thu May 31 11:55:50 CDT 2001


>>>you  can estimate the amount of time you would have a live site there,
what you were going to sell and for how much, what your traffic might have
been like, and a few other variables to establish how much the site would
have brought you over its lifetime.<<<

Seems like it would be *more* relevant how the BUYER is going to use it -
what *their* potential is for making money on it, not what you the seller
"might have made". If they are a family and their last name is Buycue, you'd
look like an idiot and an ogre trying to charge them much at all. If it's a
company that's planning to build an e-commerce site and make a zillion
dollars, however, and the name "buycue" is critical to their success, they
should be willing to invest something (maybe a grand?). I don't think you
can justify an amount like $10,000 by saying, well, I *might have* made a
million. Yes, you *might have* made a lot, but then again you *might have*
fallen on your face. You wouldn't want the buyer making an offer based on
the assumption that you would have failed, so why should you set a price
based on the assumption that you would have succeeded? In either case, you
actually didn't build ANYTHING, so why should the buyer pay for your missed
opportunity? (Note that this is not a criticism of you for not building the
site.) 

Maybe I am naive, but I don't think an obscure domain name suddenly becomes
a cash cow just because someone else expresses interest in it. If you had a
hundred emails a month from people asking about it, I'd say hold an auction
and let them fight it out. But with something like this, be reasonable and
don't make them pay for "blue sky" that doesn't even exist.

-Janet




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