Selling Domain Names

With the downturn in the economy and cashflow getting tight for a lot of people more quality domain names are showing up for sale then I’ve seen in some time. If you have a domain name you’ve been hiding under your mattress for years waiting for the perfect time to cash it on for millions of dollars here are some sites you should know about before you put the For Sale sign on the domain name:

• The Domain Name Journal – This site tracks the sales of domain names with a weekly list of the top prices paid for select domains. It will give you a better idea of what domains are worth. The automatically generated values some sites prepare for you on the fly are worthless by comparison. A domain name is worth what someone is willing to pay for it and nothing more.
• Domain Name Sales – This site has a searchable database of all aftermarket domain name sales from 2003 to the present. Type in a keyword that is relevant to your domain name and you will see what was paid for similar domains and where the sale was made. You can sort it by sales price giving you a good sense for what names are worth the most.
• SEDO – SEDO has over 1.5 million domain names in their database that you cansearch by keyword or browse by category, price, and other variables. It’s a good place to list a domain name you might want to sell. In researching some of the highest sales recorded SEDO was the firm handling a healthy percentage of them. Pizza.com, which sold earlier this year for $2.605 million, was sold on SEDO.

• Afternic – I’ve had an account at Afternic for years and have used them to park some of my domains and to offer a few for sale a couple of years ago. I didn’t receive any inquiries, but I do believe it is a reasonably good place to sell quality domains that they will feature.

There are plenty of other sites where you can sell (or find) unique domains that might be of some value, but these are the ones I have found to be the better ones with enough critical mass (i.e. eyeballs, traffic, inventory, prospective buyers) to produce worthwhile results.