Personally, and I have more than a dozen URLs of my own, I feel that
there is almost no market for any of your addresses unless they are
already tied to busy Web sites and I see that, bachelorlife.com, at
least, is just a simple place holder. I have listed another good site
which will offer your addresses for sale at no cost and included a
number of suggestions about how you can determine or increase the
value of your URLs as well as some suggestions about direct marketing
them which, I believe, is by far your best bet for the addresses you
have listed.
But you don’t want just my opinion so one good place to get some ideas
about the value of your sites is to simply go to:
http://www.buydomains.com/
They have a database of 10,000 addresses for sale. For example, they
have americanbachelors.com and bachelor-party.com for sale and,
although it takes several days to get a solid quite, they will cost
between $688 and $10,000. A good way to value your site is to select
what you consider a comparable site, check to see if it is also just a
place holder or is an active URL, then find out what it would cost you
to buy it.
You can also list your site for sale at BuyDomains for free.
BuyDomains also offers some good guidelines on valuing a site. Most
sites which have an actual value either consist of a name which some
company has already established as a brand and they are willing to pay
a premium to keep it from someone else or to use it for themselves, or
the URL is already linked with a going business and a Web site which
has a number of visitors. To value a site which is active you need to
count the number of unique visitors and determine their value as
customers. If you aren’t selling anything then they are probably only
worth a few dollars each.
Without one of these two things going for your URLs you would have to
find someone who was ready to start a major Internet project which
could use your URL and who can’t find some better or just as good
address still available.
To find businesses which might be interested you can simply do a
Google Search on your own for any business names which you can think
of.
I tried both bachelor life and bachelor life corp with no decent
results.
Next you can try to look for trademarks the same as or similar to your
URLs and try to contact the trademark holder directly.
Start at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office which has an online
search feature:
http://www.uspto.gov/
In particular, you want the TESS site
http://tess.uspto.gov/bin/gate.exe?f=tess&state=r1p44j.1.1
to conduct the actual search. You will find numerous trademarks which
contain some or all of the words in your URLs.
There are other trademark search services which will do the job for a
fee, but I wouldn’t waste your money on them, this is a real long
shot.
I will skip details about valuing and selling URLs associated with
going Web site businesses since this doesn’t appear to apply to your
addresses.
Next, you can try offering your addresses on eBay. This would
probably be your best bet right after you seriously reconsider
contacting the person who offered to buy bachelorlife.com and selling
it to him/her immediately. You can even take out a very inexpensive
Google ad which will appear when key search words you specify are
entered. For example, for a few cents per display you could have your
offer to sell bachelorlife.com pop up on any search including the word
“bachelor.”
The golden day of URLs is long past and, in any case, I don’t see any
particular value in any of yours. Look at it from the standpoint of
the buyer. What’s so special about your address that they should pay
a premium for it rather than just register a similar or better one
directly and for less? I’m not saying there isn’t anything special,
but it’s up to you to identify that element and promote it to
potential buyers unless it’s very obvious. Otherwise you’re in the
position of trying to sell a business name for a business which
doesn’t exist.
For instance, www.teenpick.com is yours, but teenpick.biz, .org, .us,
and .net are all available, as is teen-pick.com. Personally I don’t
know what special significance the term “teen pick” has, but it may be
slang and therefore have a special value which you must identify.
The same goes for bachelor-life.com which is available, as is
abachelorlife.com and abachelorslife.com.
Given the ready availability of other addresses which appear to be
just as desirable, it’s difficult to assign any particular value to
your URLs.
I’m sorry that this probably didn’t provide the answer you wanted to
get, but I believe it is the only correct answer to your question and
that this answer will help you in the long run if you don’t get caught
up in some valuation concept other than what someone will pay for your
URL. In the final analysis, in pure money terms, anything is only
worth what someone else is willing to pay. If you can increase the
traffic at your sites then they will become valuable. If you can
locate some existing business which could benefit from using the
precise name you are selling and don’t already have a good URL and Web
site, then you can try to sell to them at a premium price. |
Clarification of Answer by
siliconsamurai-ga
on
10 Jul 2002 13:17 PDT
Further Information
A URL appraiser is auctioning his services on eBay:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2037755995
I'm not recommending using the service, but it is the least expensive
I could find.
Although there are some reports that you can’t sell a URL on eBay, the
truth is that they just don't sell very well, which is as good a proof
as you can ask for that the boom days are over. Here is just one
current example:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2037096788
Although there haven’t been any bids, it is actively listed and it is
a pretty interesting name being offered.
The lowest cost URL broker I could locate is URL Merchant:
http://www.urlmerchant.com/
Of course most, including UrlMerchant will list your site for free,
there are fees if you sell. I believe this to be the best location to
sell a valuable URL but they report that, with rare exceptions, most
sites end up selling for far, far less than the original asking price
which is yet another indication that sellers don’t have a good grasp
of the current market.
http://www.urlmerchant.com/pricingadvice.html
There are good pricing guidelines at:
http://www.urlmerchant.com/nameselection.html
where you can look over ideas about what’s selling now and what isn’t
worth listing.
A final note, although I mentioned trademarks, it was only because you
already own URLs. Deliberately registering some company’s trademark
can lead to big legal trouble and your best bet is to locate a company
willing to pay for something which is very close to their actual
trademark, perhaps because your URL is catchier or easier to remember.
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