Domainer Income Revolutionizes The Way People Find, Buy, Value and Monetize Domain Names
By Anna Johnson on June 30th, 2010Today, my company, Kikabink, released Domainer Income – the world’s foremost investment platform for finding, analyzing, valuing, buying, monetizing and managing domain names – in beta. Domainer Income promises to revolutionize the way people buy, monetize and sell domains. In fact, it will help accelerate and legitimize domain names as an investment class. Bold statements, I know, so let me explain…
First, a quick description of what Domainer Income is and does.
To give you some perspective, think of Domainer Income as the ‘E-Trade(R)’ of domain name investment.
Domainer Income provides extensive – the MOST extensive – array of domain names for sale and expired domain names in one place. It features domains for sale on the top domain name aftermarket sites, dropping domains available via domain name auctions, expired domain names, and domains for sale on popular forums and websites where people buy and sell websites and domains.
On top of that, Domainer Income provides extensive analytical data about these domains… plus data on trends in domain name registrations, refunds and expired domains… trends in the domain parking industry… real-time and historical data on domain name sales… and a complete toolset for managing your portfolio of domain names, so you can (among many other things) monitor the return on investment (ROI) of your domains and keep track of when your domains are due to expire.
I could go on and on about the features and benefits of Domainer Income, but instead of doing that, let me encourage you to visit Domainer Income, watch the free videos and learn all about the benefits of our domaining platform for yourself. You can also sign up for a free or professional membership and start using Domainer Income straight away.
So why is Domainer Income so revolutionary?
Let me explain with a story – the story of how Simon – my husband and business partner – and I got involved in domain investing in the first place.
A few years back we discovered that people and companies were investing in domain names as a full-time – and very lucrative – gig, and that an entire industry had grown up around the practice of buying and monetizing domain names.
Now, there are many opinions – and some controversy – over what constitutes ‘domain name investing’ (a.k.a. ‘domaining’), and not all of them are complimentary.
Unfortunately, domaining has its (more than) fair share of shady characters engaged in such activities as cybersquatting and typosquatting, which have given domain name investing a bad name in some circles. (Cybersquatting and typosquatting are two variations on the same theme. They involve unscrupulous individuals registering domain names based on others’ trade marks in order to either extort the trade mark owners into buying those domains at inflated prices, or to trick website visitors into clicking on links or making purchases that generate revenue for the domain name owners).
Domain name investing, as we define it, however, simply involves buying domain names in order to generate a financial return. This includes buying domains in order to sell them, buying domains to park them with domain parking companies, and developing domain names into fully-fledged websites.
Developing domains is where the worlds of what has traditionally been described as ‘domaining’ and what could be called ‘Internet marketing’ converge. In this context, developing a website includes everything from putting up a blog designed to promote affiliate offers, to developing an e-commerce site selling lots of products and services, to creating a 1,000+ page content site.
While domain name investing incorporates registering new domains (since these can certainly generate a financial return!), most domain name investors focus on buying and monetizing pre-owned domain names.
As in real estate, the most valuable domain names, nowadays, tend to be pre-owned since they have accrued value in ways that newly registered domain names have not. Value can accrue from such factors as a pre-existing search engine ranking, back-links to the domain, existing levels of traffic, and various other criteria (all of which can be found in Domainer Income).
Now, aside from what you actually do with a domain name once you’ve bought it, there’s another side to domain name investing that not only has a huge impact on how much you pay for a domain – and your ROI from it – but also requires a certain level of expertise. In fact, there are plenty of domainers who would probably say they enjoy this side of domain name investing the most.
This is where many domain name investors DIVERGE from Internet marketers and, in fact, exhibit traits that are more akin to those of stock, futures and options traders.
It’s the process of finding, analyzing, valuing, negotiating and bidding on domain names.
In our case, Simon, in particular, fell in love with the ‘thrill of the chase’ involved in finding and buying quality domain names (i.e. domain names with high ROI potential).
Consequently, since we already knew how to develop and monetize domains, all we needed to do was get up to speed on the finding, valuing and buying side of domain name investing in order to be off and running as domain name investors.
Unfortunately, we then found ourselves with a HUGE problem.
A problem that severely curtailed our ability to:
(a) Find good domain names;
(b) Analyze and value those domains; and
(c) Buy or bid on them BEFORE it was too late (i.e. before others snapped them up).
It was just plain HARD to find quality domain names given the many thousands of domain names that became available each day – the domains for sale on the aftermarkets, the dropping domains (i.e. expired domain names about to become available), the expired domains, and the domain names being offered for sale on forums and auction sites.
It was IMPOSSIBLE to get, in one place, all the key analytical data we needed to properly analyze and value domain names.
And we were constantly MISSING OUT on great domain names because it took so long to find, analyze and value many of the domain names we were able to find and gather information on.
Our problem was: ‘not enough information, too late’.
Thankfully, we weren’t deterred by this problem. Like any resourceful entrepreneurs (is there such a thing as a non-resourceful entrepreneur?), we decided to build a system that would solve the problem of not having timely access to critical information.
So, before long we had a system that, among other things, updated us – in almost real-time – on all the domain names we could buy, and which gathered together all the key metrics we needed to help us evaluate and value a given domain name.
Then the penny dropped.
We realized that most domain name investors – especially new domainers and individual domain investors – faced the same information problem we had endured.
Since we were also heavily involved in Internet marketing, I told Simon that we should commercialize our system and make it available to other domain name investors.
Initially, Simon was reluctant. He thought that opening up our system to others would put us at a disadvantage. It might open the floodgates to even more competition for the same domain names.
But, in reality – as the data in Domainer Income shows – literally thousands upon thousands of domain names become available to buy each DAY. In fact, 50,000+ domains expire on a daily basis. And that’s just expired domain names.
What’s more, despite providing access to universally applicable domain name metrics, we would still have our own unique investment objectives that would guide our choice of domains to buy. We just weren’t necessarily looking for the same domains as others.
Bottom line: there were – and are – plenty of domain names for everyone. In fact, there are way, way, way more domains (including good domains) than there are domain name investors.
What was much more exciting to me, though, was the prospect of creating a groundbreaking system that would not only help the many thousands of people looking to buy domain names, but would significantly elevate the status of domain name investing itself.
So, eventually Simon agreed, and we began building Domainer Income into a comprehensive domain name investment platform anybody could use.
Now, I’m happy to say, Domainer Income both levels the playing field for all domain name investors, and also delivers a professional quality system that includes an unprecedented array of data and tools.
In fact, Domainer Income does much more than provide access to domain names and domain name metrics. It also provides: ‘insider’ information on trends in domain name registrations, refunds and expired domain names; trends in the domain name parking industry; sales figures for domain names sold both recently and those sold in the last four years (it has the sales figures for over 30,000 domain names); and a powerful set of tools for managing domains and tracking their profitability and ROI.
And we still have many more features to add!
Yet, building Domainer Income has NOT been easy nor cheap.
It’s taken a team of programmers, more than three years, and into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, to develop. We have faced numerous technical and other challenges along the way.
And everything – from overcoming software bugs to creating the promotional videos – has taken longer than we expected. After all, we thought we’d be launching Domainer Income 6 months ago (and 6 months ago we thought we’d be launching it 6 months before that)!
But that seems to be the way it goes for entrepreneurs. Something to do with having unrealistic expectations…
And although we generally agree with the idea of ‘speed over perfection’ in relation to releasing products, speed can NEVER be at the cost of quality. No question, we have been – and continue to be – deadly serious about providing a robust system that we will continue to enhance and support.
So there you have it – the story behind Domainer Income.
What does Domainer Income mean for you?
Well, if you are a domain name investor, interested in domain name investing, or are looking to buy pre-owned domain names, Domainer Income will likely save you a lot of time and money. You’ll get timely, comprehensive and invaluable information and tools that will give you a huge edge when it comes to finding, valuing, buying, monetizing and managing domain names.
But you can learn all about the benefits at Domainer Income.
You can also sign up for a free membership, which gives you many of Domainer Income’s great features or, if you’re serious about domain name investing, get a professional membership which gives you access to ALL the features.
All in all, I’d love for you to check out our domaining platform and see what you think.
