German Domain Portfolio Goes For Over $700K
Just happened to spot that Hecta Media announced the purchase of a portfolio of German and other European centric domains for a tad under $735K.
UK Domain Rentals
Happened to stumble upon Harpoon earlier who seem to be practising a business model I’m very interested in - domain rentals.
Rather than parking a domain I’m wondering if there’s more revenue to be had in leasing domains? Scott at selfmademinds aired his own experiences only yesterday. He highlights that there’s some grafting to be done in an attempt to secure a lease deal - something that may well be off-putting to many domainers.
I wonder how many domains Harpoon manage to rent out? I’ve checked a few like heels.co.uk gardenplants.co.uk donor.co.uk (better as an org I know) and studycourses.co.uk and they are still unlet. I note that they quote a typical monthly rent of between £20-£40 just for the domain - hosting is not included.
It’d be great to hear from anyone with experience of domain leasing.
I Was Hacked
Someone hacked this blog on the 27th March by modifying the header.php file in the theme folder.
Time for a security review!
Firefox Extension For Domainers
Fellow Wirral domainer and coffee drinking friend Chris Hough has been busy getting a useful firefox plugin developed. The domaining for firefox plugin provides additional information when browsing the on-auction and drop lists in many of the leading domain auction sites such as sedo and namejet to name but two.
The plugin provides (optional) additional data such as:
- PR (pagerank)
- Google cache
- Age
- Alexa ranking
- Dmoz listed
- whois link
Personally I’d prefer slightly different default settings as I take little notice of alexa but it only takes a second to set your preferred plugin defaults. Anyone who is familiar with Aaron Wall’s seo plugin (for firefox as well) will find this plugin a breeze to setup/configure.
This plugin is currently beta though it seems robust as I use it in sedo. I’d like it to be a bit faster but then I always set the number of entries per page to be 100 rather than the default 25 so I’m making it work harder!
On the blog that details the plugin there are a couple of presentation issues that should take 5 mins to resolve. There are some useful (silent) feature videos to watch that show how to install and use the plugin.
You can download the demo version here and the full version is only $9.99 / £5
Happy domaining!
Choice Domains
Stumbled upon Choice Domains - some really nice generics in the published portfolio. Well, assuming it’s upto date that is - the website could do with a lick of paint.
Generic .co.uk Domains
I reckon that there must still be some available gems in the generic world of .co.uk domains. Okay, the quality one word’ers have been reg’d just like .coms have, but for decent two word generics I think there is still some scope.
For instance, I’ve just started to develop a mini site around the generic name of broadband cards. Mobile broadband is yet to really take off but hopefully there’s a market there to be tapped. Different searchers will call it different things - hopefully some will directly navigate to my new site!
Of course, new technology will always offer opportunties for generic domains as I mentioned in this post - the downside being that not all new technologies are adopted by the paying public.
I’ve got a couple of other new domains in small niche areas that I’ll post about in due course.
pwp.com
We went for a lunchtime walk recently around Meols, Wirral where I used to live - in fact I still live very close by in neighbouring Hoylake. There’s a private tennis club that we walked past - spot the domain name branding in this photo:
Premium domain name there - pwp.com is an online and high-street racquet store (BTW racquet or racket?). In terms of good URL / bad URL I reckon this is good. They’ve got the .co.uk too
Curved Monitors
I happened to read about these new fancy curved monitors a couple of weeks or so ago - I wonder how good they are?
As someone hoping to stumble upon killer domain names I checked what relevant domain names were available. There’s a few possible permutations here with curve/curved and singular/plural too.
Of course, curvedmonitors.com (my first choice) had gone but I managed to reg these:
- www.curvedmonitors.net
- www.curvedmonitors.org
- www.curvemonitors.com
- www.curvemonitors.net
- www.curvemonitors.org
Also got a couple of co.uk ones too. It’s probably early days with the technology and of course it might be a complete flop but new technology ideas are obviously one good source for new domain ideas. So amongst all these new ideas, a few will fly. Maybe bendy monitors will be one of them!
Some Prefer l-l Rather Than ll
Happened to be watching an advert on TV for our National Lottery and noticed they chose to display a URL of national-lottery.co.uk
I see that nationallottery.co.uk redirects to the hypenated version. I wonder if they believe that the double ll in the non-hypenated URL doesn’t work as well?
Not The Way To Trade Domains On Ebay
If I was buying and re-selling domains on ebay I’d use two accounts, one for buying and the other for selling.
That way, other potential domain bidders wouldn’t be able to see from my feedback history that, just like this ebayer, I’d won a domain for $29.00 and I’m now trying to flip it for £999 (approx $2000)!
I’ve set up a couple of ebay (UK) searches within my account and simply subscribe to the rss feed of that search to see what domain names are offered. There’s a lot of trademark related stuff, including ones with ebay in the name …that’s a little ironic considering just how hot ebay is on use of its own name.