Internet Business

This was one of the more impressive domain auctions I have seen at snapnames.com Dreamlife.com selling for US$171,750 at snapnames, my first impression was, whoever paid that much for this domain must be bonkers, well turns out it was bonkerstwo, the undefeated king of domain auctions who has access to what seems like an unlimited flow of cash on tap. I think it is overpriced. Inevitably some kind of parking page will pop up, and of course the ppc revenue will come nowhere close to matching the price paid for the domain, well at least I dont think so. So what is the strategy for a domain like this? overture shows that it has a search volume of 556 with the extension. Their is a hasbro game called dreamlife. Then of course there is the branding potential of a name like this, good for a film production company, dreamlife studios, or perhaps a challenger to the incredibly popular secondlife.com

Also on this weeks dnjournal sales chart, connected.co.uk was reported to have been sold for 80,000 pounds which is equivalent to around $159,400 US dollars.  Personally I think they payed too much, but the buyer netbasic from the UK appear to be quite a professional outfit and I am sure they will recoup their costs. What makes this particularly interesting is that the domain was purchased in January 2006 for $3,500 which is quite a nice return for such a short period of time.

According to the weekly dnjournal sales report, the domain iran.com was sold for US$400,000.  The domain was purchased by Rick Latona of digipawn.com. Now my first reaction was, that is not a domain that I would personally pay US$400,000 for, it is not exactly a top holiday destination at the moment. But if you look further, according to overture stats, the word iran for January 07 was searched for 367,397 times.  It already has a reasonably respectable alexa ranking of 229,928. On the site it says “Iran is the 18th largest country in the world and home to 70 million ”.  A little research of my own, not sure how accurate these figures are, show that Iran has the third largest oil reserves in the world. So basically, if somebody has US$400,000 to spend on a domain in the first place, I will assume that they must know what they are doing.

Well I cant resist a contest, seems like half the posts here are related to contests.  Anyhow, John Chow, someone who really knows how to make money in conjunction with Bluefur.com who is hosting canada websites, are currently holding a contest to win a 24″ lg monitor.

Well Project X from Jason Calacanis was finally released, it was Mahalo.com a human powered search engine.  Mahalo means thank you according to a post he made a while back. I have nothing but respect for Jason Calcanis and what he has achieved.  I have to admit that my first impressions of the new site were not really good.  But then I usually have a clear plan of having things being close to profitable within several months of launch. This site appears to have a lot of venture capital behind it due to his strong connections in those circles.  Also have to admire the amount of press that he can generate for the site launch.

If I am being honest, I just dont like the site, I dont like the name, I dont like the colors.  I dont like the main page with all those pictures which comes close to looking something like a domain parking page, something which everyone on the internet hates, well at least I do. I would have gone for a more cooler color scheme, none of that overdone web 2.0 look, and I would have gone for the simplistic look, much like google, site name, search bar, and then some of the major headings of the important categories. All things said and done, I am not a Jason Calacanis hater, I am a big fan, I was expecting something more like what he had done with netscape.com engadget.com etc Anyhow I hope mahalo.com becomes a success.

Read about this at Frank Schilling’s blog, it appears Mike Mann bought the domain seo.com the absolute ultimate domain for anyone in the seo industry. This is one domain that I would really like to own, as I am sure thousands of others would as well.  Not sure what the actual price paid for this domain was, I would have thought it would be somewhere in the six figure range, but this site lists the purchase price at a reported purchase price at US$5 million.  That price is definitely within his capability given that he sold buydomains.com for US$65 million plus. It appears he is using the site for his seo company webtargeted.com Guess I will have to content myself with my lowly seocompany.com domain which I registered back in 2003.

Well being a fan of John Chow, and an even bigger fan of Bill gates, I just had to enter the Microsoft Zune Contest. THis zune is the one that he won in some business meeting he attended in Canada, gee, some people really do have all the luck. John Chow’s blog offers great tips on how to make money on the internet . I have not blogged lately here, been busy with a lot of other things, but I do regularly read all the blogs in my google reader.

John Chow, root of all evil,  is holding a contest to win a Nintendo Wii. Even though I never win anything, I am entering the competition. The competition is sponsored by 1234pens.com, online retailer of promotional pens and more details can be found here. It will be interesting to see how this content boosts his ranking for the term “root of all evil” one of his posts currently ranks position number 51 in google for the term.

According to a post at domainnamewire, moniker sold domains at an auction totalling US$4.3 million.  Families.com was the highest selling domain at US$650,000. Greeting.com sold for US$350,00 although I think greetings.com would be worth more. The domain that struck me as being a bargain was et.com at $225,000. Apart from being short for extra terrestrial and the name of one of steven spielberg’s most famous movies et, it is also the commonly known abbreviation for entertainment tonight. It will be interesting to see who the buyer turns out to be.
Another interesting sale is blogster.com. This domain was purchased in 2005 for US$100,000 which at the time appeared to be quite a high price for such a domain. Well at the moniker auction, it was on sold for US$275,000. It is not sure whether the site was included with the domain name. The site has a PR5 and an alexa ranking of 25,250 which is fairly respectable, so it is hard to assess what was paid for the actual domain and site components.

This post at Guy Kawasaki’s blog contains some interesting comments by some very successful internet/technology start-ups. The most interesting one is Paul Graham from via web.

On raising money: “The advice I would give is to avoid it. I would say spend as little as you can because every dollar of the investors’ money you get will be taken out of your ass…”

Yes, I know that is a bit crude, but definitely one of the downsides of accepting venture capital. Then again, I think the number of highly successful ventures which ended up being worth outrageous amounts of money, all accepted venture capital, the most famous one that comes to mind is google, they would most probably not be where they are today without venture capital.