Are Domainers Snoozin’ or Cruisin’ with their Choosin’?

Somewhere lost in the controversy earlier this week surrounding my post about bids made on domains that did not sell at the TRAFFIC/Moniker auction, as documented live in this post, was the radical idea that domainers were walking away from a lot of money — in essence, by choice.  Whether that choice came from an actual buyer’s bid, or a reserve price that a buyer didn’t match, the bigger story remains that domainers are choosing to keep their domains, even in the face of substantial opportunities to sell.

Some people claim that domainers are insane or asleep at the wheel, and are asking for too much money, with too high reserves.  (This is not referring to some of the more off-the-wall ebayers who want a gazillion dollars for a nonsense name; it’s about keyword rich names in meaningful niches with supportable valuations.)  The industry is maturing.  In many cases, domainers have analyzed a market and seized an opportunity, and have in mind a number that would make it worthwhile to them to sell.  If that number is not met, they are just fine cruising through time until it is met, or it is raised.  Domainers know that it is only a matter of time until a keyword rich domain property is valued at a target price, and they are perfectly happy working over time on developing their key domain assets, to enhance their natural value.  

Many domainers have a portfolio of substantial names, but sometimes there are certain names that end up being a favorite over others.. even though they’re all good…. or mostly good.  Those can have an especially weighted hold-until-the-right-price aspect, making domainers just as happy cruising along, rather than pounce on an opportunity today, to sell.

Even when “life happens” a domainer can have flexibility that defies logic.  For example, when my perfectly fit husband had a massive heart attack at Christmas time,  I had to let go of some names that I didn’t want to let go of, and am even now considering selling the bulk of my portfolio of thousands of generic .coms, but I could also walk away from offers for PlanningRetirement.com, even though it’s an ugly and broken site.  It was always my intention to rebuild it and make it a world class site, and even as I saw it go in and out of the first page of Google, and then get hacked, and more, I can stand to wait.  I can watch TV and see ad, after ad, after ad of big companies fighting over the planning retirement business.  I can look at demographic trends of baby boomers aging, and their children wanting to save so they have more choices in taking care of their parents, and in being able to take care of themselves.  I can look at the convergence of these trends, along with the flash point of corporation after corporation bailing out on their employees and abandoning their pension plans, leaving the employees, retirees, and outsourced people to go out and re-allocate their money and develop their plan. And I can look at the multil $billion annual business it represents.  And I can wait. 

All that to show that domainers and prices aren’t always so far off; domainers are often highly educated about their domain and it’s niche and the potential it has in that niche, because the keywords tell the story in a meaningful way, and hook customers up with the solution.   Domainers aren’t asleep at the wheel, and they aren’t insane; they are, by choice, cruising through time until they get to the right time and the right price — if there even is one.  Some domains will never be for sale again.

So it is instructive to analyze what doesn’t sell at an auction, and what kind of money domainers are willing to walk away from.  There is a wealth of knowledge hidden in the implications of that one radical observation.