How to Price Your Domain Names

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As a domain investor, it’s vitally important that you understand the true value of the names that you own. At first you’re probably going to overvalue what you have. Unless you’re really honest with yourself, the next phase most likely involves you undervaluing some parts of your portfolio. Only through experience will you come to understand the value of your domains.

.com is King

When we talk about names that you own, I mean that you have to hold the .com domains. Aside from very rare circumstances, other TLDs will not have more value than the .com version. Someone that owns the .net, .info, .co, .io, .ai or whatever else will always see the .com as an upgrade to their name, so it will be their desire to own it.

Taking all of that into account, it’s clear that I wouldn’t put too much value on having anything other than a .com. There are those that make good money selling over TLDs and even gTLDs, but the big money is in .coms and it’s where beginners should definitely invest the majority of their time, attention and budget.

End-User vs Wholesale Value

The big sales in the domain world – the ones that you hear about and may make it into mainstream news – are the end-user purchases. This is how much a company has spent on being able to acquire the most desirable online destination for their brand, campaign or whatever else.

End-users may be start-ups looking for a name that summarises their idea or existing companies that want to upgrade their current portfolio. End-users have and/or are willing to part with large sums of money to acquire a name.

The wholesale value of your domain is how much the domain is worth to someone that is going to resell the name to someone else at a later date. These people may specialise in domains in a particular industry, or have the research and sales skills to pitch domains to companies with large pockets. Either way, they will only invest if they know they can make more money by selling the domain at a later date.

The wholesale value is nowhere near the end-user value of your domain. When pricing your domains, you need to know who you’re selling to. If you’re hoping for a quick sale, there’s no shame in wanting a reseller to take it off your hands. However, if you’re happy to wait a while longer – and take a few sales price enquiries before you sell – you can make a lot more on an end-user sale.

Should You Use Appraisal Services?

There are so many domain name appraisal services and they all work on the same basic idea of comparing the word or words within your domain to recent domain sales to determine its relative worth. Some of them go further and look for linguistic cues to see whether some letter combinations – especially made up ones – would be more valuable than others. All of them vary massively in the values that they come up with.

I’m of the opinion that domain appraisals are good all to give you a fundamental understanding of whether a domain has value, but they’re not so good for pricing. It’s the reason I don’t include any in my domain essentials list. The only one I tend to use is GoDaddy’s, although I never use it to determine the actual price of a domain; it’s more to get a ballpark of ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ for any handregistered domains that I come up with.

Where’s the Best Place to Figure Out the Price of Your Domain?

Without a doubt, NameBio is the most reliable place to get an idea of what your domain is worth. Every day they publish the day’s public sales, letting people know exactly how much domains sold for and on which platform. The platform – Sedo, GoDaddy, BuyDomains, etc is important because some of them are frequented by resellers more than businesses, which obviously has a significantly influence on the price.

You can pay for a NameBio subscription which allows you to do bulk searches and go through historic sales of domains with particular keywords and characteristics. It should always be the first place you go to find out how to price your domains.