Interesting Domain Name of the Day 09-29-14

Domain Name of the Day

Today’s first interesting domain name is:

Woot.com

4L Domain Names

I recently moved and I got some boxes from friends and one of those boxes is this picture and corresponding Domain Name.  IMO it is a very cool domain for a lot more reasons than the product domain discussion.

You may have heard of Woot.com.  They’ve been around on the internet selling stuff since 2004.  Were you even using the internet to buy stuff in 2004?  Probably not.

Woot has an interesting background with a cool business model you can check out on their wikipedia entry – it really is interesting if you have a few minutes to check it out.

Let’s get right to the point with this great domain.

Sometimes you can’t tell if a domain is great or not when you first see it… not in this case because it is excellent in so many ways.

Brandable Domains

This is one of the first type of domains people end up buying for investment.  Brandable domains such as Amazon or Google are perfect examples. Brandables might be words used in a different context or they may just be made up words. Most people can’t afford short one word .com’s so they run across made up words that sound cool to them.

Be very careful buying the made up version of brandables.  Trust me, they are VERY hard to sell and you will very likely never sell them.

In Woot’s case, the word had been around especially on the internet in gaming and used in forums extensively before it became their brand.

It is used as a term of excitement or happiness and is popular with gamers and long time internet users… exactly the type of people who buy stuff online early on the internet.

In addition to the positive connotations of the word, it is short.  4 Letter words, on the internet at least, are gold!  Short is easier to remember and is easy to brand.

The word also just looks good with the double o and the way it flows and sounds.  Easy to spell and even better, hard to misspell.

Tough to beat that.

I can’t give a value, but if you look at the history of sales and come up with any 4 letter word that sounds good it will probably have sold for a decent amount or hasn’t ever been resold. Similar words pop into my mind like loot, boot, zoot, wood, wool, gold, love, hair, etc. If you look those up my guess is they are high 5 figure minimum with some easily reaching 7 figures (think gold here).

One thing about brandables that I won’t dwell on any more is the fact someone has to be looking for the exact name or making up words and really love yours if it happens to be a made up word. Given the number of possibilities and the fact they can just make up another word makes these a rare sell.

You will fall in love with one or more and keep them. Fine. Just make sure it is a small percentage of your overall portfolio unless you have money to burn or you can buy 4 letter, pronouncable .com’s. Those never go out of style and the demand is always high.

Just to recap…

Domain Name Pros:

• One word Domain
• Short
• 4 letters
• Pronouncable
• Common
• Positive connotations
• Passes the radio test

Domain Name Cons:

• Some people may not have heard the word.

Side note on this domain – Woot was sold to Amazon in 2010. And unlike some other acquisitions Amazon didn’t fold them into their brand. It is still up and running.

Today’s Second interesting domain name is:

Well, this *domain* is related to this domain because it is 4 letters and will let you see the difference between 4 letter domains in general.

Domain Shane usually includes at least one 4 letter domain in his list a week and quite often one or more per day.  Today’s list is the perfect example.

The domain list includes Qace.com, GPPU.com, MLVC.com, and VHLC.com.  This gives you a broad array of this type of domain investment.

I didn’t check all of them, but in my opinion Qace is the best of these from a pronouncable standpoint because you can actually say it. Not great because it starts with a Q which makes it a little harder to say. What is important is that it sold for low 4 figures.

When it comes to 4L .com’s what is important to keep in mind is that these come up for sale all the time and many are for sale from domainers, but ALL of them are taken – ALL 456,976 of them if you are only counting the 26 regular letters of the alphabet.  26x26x26x26 is almost half a million of these and they sell routinely on forums and drops/auctions for low teens to low hundreds.

4 Letter Domains sales prices

What makes some worth low thousands to many, many thousands? Here is a list of recent sales from DNSalePrice.com – you should be able to look at the list and see what made them sell for way more than the average 4L in most cases.

There are some rules about premium letters, premium combinations of letters, etc but I’ll save that for another day.

I hope you like this type of discussion on domain values and thinking through some of this because to really be good at reselling domains you need to understand the market and what has liquidity, what is a long term investment, etc… It takes a lot of time and experience… I’m not quite there yet, but I’m trying to learn.

As with each of these daily posts, you can comment below with ONE domain name you have for sale – must give the exact name, own it yourself, prefer pricing BIN.  And today I would like any 4 letter or brandable Domains you have, but any good domain is fine if that isn’t your thing.

Let me know what you think!