I am busy planning exactly what I'm going to do with the domain name "Home-Page.com" but I wanted to find out what kind of value others put on the domain. It clearly has a lot of applicability in the hosting market, especially for providers offering personal web hosting services.

For reference, there were over 1.3 million searches on Google last month for the two-word combination "home page" so it looks like a pretty popular set of keywords!

Here's the deal: if you are SERIOUS about wanting to purchase the domain name, please make a bid for it on this thread. I would really, really be grateful if you don't waste others' time by entering a bid if you're not prepared to purchase the name at that price.

Obviously (at least, I hope it's obvious!) if somebody's posted a bid for the name, you'll want to post a HIGHER bid.

On February 15th (1 week from now) I'll look over all the bids (if indeed, there ARE bids) and then decide whether I want to keep the name, or get some exercise by taking the money and running :)

Let me make sure that's crystal clear: I am NOT obligated to SELL THE NAME AT ALL, but by posting a bid you're obligated to buy it at that price should I accept your bid.

I know the above sounds a bit messy - it's really an experiment in many ways to see what people think of Home-Page.com's potential.

Thanks!

Shame about the hyphen :rolleyes:


Lats...

Could you give us an estimate? Like the lowest offer that you'd consider, that'd be helpful. It would be great for my web site, to pull traffic in, if someone could get it listed high at google, but I'm afraid it's way out of my range, but I'm asking your minimum offer you'd consider to see if it might by chance be in my price range.

Thanks,

I can't give a specific price at which I'd be willing to sell it, since then I'd essentially be committing myself to selling it if an offer were made at that price (Catch 22)

Let me however say that I've sold 9 domains in the last 30 days; each transactions was for between $300 and $4,700... My expectation is that Home-Page.com is worth substantially more than the upper end of that range.

(If you want to make an offer by email so as not to reveal your identity - under the same conditions as an open offer posted on this Forum - then I will repost the amount of your offer here without disclosing your name - though you might get outbid before I can post it.)

By the way, if you need a demonstration of the power of a targeted domain name, try typing "free cellular phones" into Google (without the " marks) and then look at the #3 site... and then check the Whois on that domain :)

Of course, I can't *guarantee* instant results, but it's probably worth thinking about!

your basing all this on search engine results of only one search engine. what if in 2-3 months google changes the way they index pages and your site just dropped from the top ten to bottom 4 million...then what will the domain be worth to the person who just bought it ?

:confused: :eek:

AlaskanWolf once pondered..."What's in a search engine position that's not even permanent?" :D

Originally posted by AlaskanWolf
your basing all this on search engine results of only one search engine. what if in 2-3 months google changes the way they index pages and your site just dropped from the top ten to bottom 4 million...then what will the domain be worth to the person who just bought it ?

Obviously I can only comment from my own perspective, not from the purchaser's perspective... but you're quite right!

So the first thing I would do is make sure that the site has relevant material on it, stuff which people would want to see.

Then I'd make sure it is findable by the other search engines, plus get a Dmoz/Yahoo!/Looksmart listing (yes, *pay* for them if needs be) and let Google chew on those listings (great page rank popularity from a Yahoo! listing) and so on i.e. do all the things one should be doing in any case to optimize a site in the search engines... and that would no doubt preserve its rankings.

Plus I would set things up so that people can easily bookmark the site or set it as their home page (an obvious choice of actions, given the domain name in question) but of course without using some horrible auto-bookmarking ActiveX thingy that runs as soon as they entered the site - those are dispicable! So that way I'd be rapidly building return visitors and traffic.

It's not worth *my* time and effort to go through all the above for a simple one-page gateway to affiliate programs like free-cellular-phones.com is set up now... but if I was putting together a "real" site for Home-Page.com the effort's very much worth it.

Incidentally, I've just outlined (in the most concise of nutshells) what my own plans for Home-Page.com are should I decide not to sell it.

All of the above steps (except the "bookmark the site" and "make this page my homepage" stuff) are part of what I've been doing in any case for years in promoting my other sites...

Taking the example of EmailAddresses.com, it comes up #1 on Yahoo!, #2 on Google, #2 on DirectHit and so on for the term "free email"

Sorry, I guess I digressed a bit with the above answer, but your question kind of set me off...

Originally posted by Edwin
Taking the example of EmailAddresses.com, it comes up #1 on Yahoo!, #2 on Google, #2 on DirectHit and so on for the term "free email"
I would have thought free-email.com would have ranked up there ;) j/k

Edwin (for those of you who don't know), has just a couple of domains (sarcasm). Do you have a master list of all the ones you own and that are for sale? Are you up on a current count?

Originally posted by Chicken

I would have thought free-email.com would have ranked up there ;) j/k

Edwin (for those of you who don't know), has just a couple of domains (sarcasm). Do you have a master list of all the ones you own and that are for sale? Are you up on a current count?

Hmm, well, I don't have "free-email.com" but I do have "email-address.com" :)

I believe last time I counted I had about 1,400 names, but it's been a while since I checked. Since you asked, here's the link to the master list, which is up to date as of the end of January (i.e. there still some names missing, but not too many):-

http://www.genkiproductions.com/all-domain-names.txt

Recent sales? Libel.com, InternetBrowser.com, GarlicBread.com, FreeWebHosts.com, DigitalMoney.com and several more...

heh, ill buy home-page.com for $8.88 ;)

Cyber: Let me however say that I've sold 9 domains in the last 30 days; each transactions was for between $300 and $4,700... My expectation is that Home-Page.com is worth substantially more than the upper end of that range.

Daniel:

Originally posted by Cyber
...for $8.88 >>;)<<
;)

Yeah, it's just getting a little boring having people bidding for stupid amounts every time someone auctions off a domain name!

thats alot of domain names, wonder how much you spend on registrar fees :D


Jim

> thats alot of domain names, wonder how much you spend on registrar fees

Well, you can probably get a fairly accurate estimate yourself if you figure that I have 1,400 domains and that I'm not one to pay over the odds for a registration. A quick burst of mental arithmetic will get you there.

Fortunately, the fees are more than covered by the sales :)

Hey Edwin. Remember me? :D

If your going to sell home-page.com, and you are expecting thousands of dollars, then you should put in on Afternic or GreatDomains. You probably won't find anyone here that is looking to spend thousands on a domain.

Originally posted by Kyle Babich
Hey Edwin. Remember me? :D

If your going to sell home-page.com, and you are expecting thousands of dollars, then you should put in on Afternic or GreatDomains. You probably won't find anyone here that is looking to spend thousands on a domain.

Of course I remember!

I agree, there are few serious buyers here... but it only takes *1* to really "get" the value of a domain like Home-Page.com. Anyway, there's only another few days for people to react one way or the other, then the chance will be gone since I'm going to be developing the name...

He's trying to say nicely... we're cheap, which is true, but ya' gotta love us anyhow. :D

Originally posted by Edwin
> thats alot of domain names, wonder how much you spend on registrar fees

Well, you can probably get a fairly accurate estimate yourself if you figure that I have 1,400 domains and that I'm not one to pay over the odds for a registration. A quick burst of mental arithmetic will get you there.
Edwin, because I like you, and I do, I'm not just saying that, but don't get me wrong, not in a Tom patting your butt kinda way (some thorough readers might get it, most won't), anyyyyy-whooo... as I was saying, because I like you, here's the deal I have for you...

You have to act fast, as I won't make this offer ever again...

You can transfer your domains over to my registration service for *ONLY* $30 per domain, per year. That's a whopping savings of $5 per domain over NetSol. I know you're wondering how you can repay me. I do it because I love you all like my little baby chickens (a.k.a. 'chicks' but that didn't sound too manly). I ask for nothing in return...

Assuming you'll say yes (as how could you pass up this offer, I ask you: HOW COULD YOU?), I will be promptly retiring and moving to Florida to be old.

Thanks for the offer, but I pay $8 a name :)

As far as I understand, he's being sarcastic. If you paid him $30 per domain...

30 x 1400 = $42,000

He's saying that he would be able to retire on the money because you have so many domains. Let's see if Chicken can live out the rest of his life on $42,000 though. :)

Yes, I was pulling his leg...

Originally posted by Kyle Babich
30 x 1400 = $42,000

You know Chicken's probably going to be paying very close to that in baby food and daipers in the next 2-3 years :D

Greg Moore

Incidentally, many may scoff at hyphens in domain names, but you can find some nice names if you don't mind the "-"

For example, today I registered "local-area-network.com" :)

And I thought the days of people paying stupid amounts of money for something, esp since the original cost was only $8, were gone.

I see we still have idiots running around with more money than brains if they are paying 4k or 5k for domains, especially ones with tons of - in them.

And I thought the dot.bomb days were here? Silly me.

Oh well.

Tom
:rolleyes:

You're entitled to your opinion, of course, Tom...

Personally, I love the domain biz. I got an offer last night, made a counter-offer and woke up this morning to find $500 in my PayPal account.

What did *you* achieve with your Sunday ;)

Well, most likely unsurprisingly, no serious bidders came forward so the offer to sell this name is closed. On a happier note, I've made $42 so far with 2 people signing up for the hosting affiliate I stuck on Home-Page.com... so looks like it's going to be a pretty lucrative domain to run :)