What's your domain name worth?
Answer:
If you don't know or have never been approached
to sell it then it probably doesn't hold much value as a stand alone domain name.  A few times a year a group of some of the more savvy Internet Marketers get together to share details on how the right domain name can make a world of difference.

This month T.R.A.F.F.I.C is getting together in New York City.  From June 19th through the 22nd hundreds of individuals from small 1 to 2 person companies to giants like Google will get together to disucuss, buy and sell domain names.  It's a huge business for Google.  Though they don't buy or sell domain names a lot of their traffic comes from these domain owners.  These domain owners direct domain names to domain name park pages in which relevant AdWords listings are presented to visitors.  Visitors click on an AdWords listing and Google earns the click revenue and passes a percentage onto the Domain owner.

Personally, I'm quite familiar with this space as I have been known to own a domain name or two.  Though there is good money to be made in parking domain names I know there is a lot more to be made developing domain names into useful web destinations.  The value of a domain name is dependant on how much traffic or visitors hit the web page the domain resides on.  More specifically, how much browser or URL type in traffic the domain name gets.  This type of marketing is based on assumptions.  Visitors or people browsing the Internet assume there is a web site at www.QandAs.com.  They type the URL into their browser and hit enter.  If there is a website residing on that domain name and if the content correlates well with the domain name then you'll likely generate some form of revenue be it paid advertising like Google Adsense or perhaps you sell your own product or services.  I've owned some pretty great domain names and at one time or another I've parked the domain names while building out the destination and I can tell you that every property I've developed earned significantly more than the parking feature did.  I understand the value in a domain name.

I realize that if you can get 1,000 people per day typing your URL in their browser (which is completely free) then that's 1,000 less visitors you have to pay for through another medium.  Traffic is valued not per visitor but per visitor depending on the value of your product or services.  One visitor that converts into a sale of a box of paper clips is less significant than one visitor that converts into a sale of a Mega Yacht (one of the domain names being auctioned).  It may take 100,000,000 visitors that purchase a box of paper clips to equate to 1 visitors that purchases a Mega Yacht.  So though paperclips.com may get significantly more traffic than megayachts.com the value of megayachts.com could be higher.

So the value of a domain name depends on how well you can convert the traffic and how valuable the niche your offering.  The catch is that they both must correlate.  Sure you can sell Mega Yachts on paperclips.com but you won't make one sale.

At this stage in the game, unless you have deep pockets I wouldn't purchase a domain name strictly for parking revenues.  I would make sure you have a plan for developing the destination.

If you're interested in buying or selling domain names check out some of these resources.

T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Domain Auction New York City (June 19 - 22, 2007)
Great Domains
Sedo
Afternic
Buy Domains
SevenMile
DomainNameWire
DomainNameNews
Conceptualist
  more Q&A sessions like this

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written by bahadir , June 22, 2009

there are alot of web sites and diffrent values about web site worth on the internet, you can search "How much is my web site worth?" from google, but I would recommend http://www.hiberya.com


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