How much is the url 'www.channelyoga.com' worth?

karm,

There are several domain name appraisal services available, such as
Great Domains, Accurate Domains, and Buy Domains. However, here is a
quick free appraisal that will probably determine the actual value
someone would be willing to pay for this domain.

First, we need to consider to intuitive nature of the keyword between
the "www." and ".com"  To be specific, we need to determine how likely
someone thinking independently would be to think of this term.  In the
yoga world, the most obvious would be single word terms such as "yoga"
or "dharma", or very well known two-word combinations such as "hatha
yoga"  Unfortunately, the term "channel yoga" is quite obscure; 
indeed, a Google search finds only 394 sites in the entire internet
universe that contain that two word combination:

://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%22channel+yoga%22

So it is not likely that anybody will randomly enter the
"www.channelyoga.com" URL in their browser to discover the site.

If the domain itself is unintuative, this can be overcome via a well
known site that drives traffic to itself.  If www.channelyoga.com was
receiving thousands of hits per day, and was expected to continue that
trend, then the domain would become more valuable by virtue of its
ability to attract visitors. Two ways of measuring the amount of
traffic a site will get is by checking its ranking on the traffic
monitoring site Alexa, or by checking the number of sites that link to
www.channelyoga.com on Google.  Unfortunately, as the results of these
tests show:

http://www.alexa.com/data/details?url=www.channelyoga.com
://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=link%3Awww.channelyoga.com%2F&btnG=Google+Search

There are no statistics for this site on Alexa. There are also no
sites indexed by Google which link to this site. Indeed, the site
itself is not even listed in Google.

Furthermore, although the domain has the most desired ".com" suffix,
it is not well protected from immitation domains. If for some reason
somebody really wanted a "channel yoga" domain, they could just as
easily pick up a similar name like "www.channel-yoga.com" or
"www.channelyoga.net", both of which are currently available:

http://betterwhois.com/bwhois.cgi?domain=channel-yoga.com
http://betterwhois.com/bwhois.cgi?domain=channelyoga.net

So, this is an uncommon keyword domain with no traffic coming into it,
no listings on major search engines, and is unprotected from copycat
domains. Based on this analysis, I must unfortunately conclude that
this domain is not currently worth what it would cost to sell it.

To improve the value of this domain in the future, the only reliable
method is to increase the visibility of your site in the major search
engines like Google and Yahoo, convince other yoga related site
webmasters to include links to your site on their sites, and try to
raise brand awareness of the "channel yoga" term such that it becomes
something that is obvious to at least yoga enthusiasts, if not other
people.

For information on getting listed in Google and Yahoo, please see the
following sites:

Google: ://www.google.com/webmasters/
Yahoo:  http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/

Before doing that, I highly recommend that you read this article from
SelfPromotion.com on how to prepare your site for the search engines:

http://www.selfpromotion.com/pageprep.t

The site itself also contains many valuable resources for getting
listed in search engines, and I would recommend you check out what's
available:

http://www.selfpromotion.com/

Good luck!

Sites cited:

Great Domains
http://www.greatdomains.com

Accurate Domains
http://www.accuratedomains.com

Buy Domains
http://www.buydomains.com

Siddha Yoga Terminology
http://www.siddhayoga.org/glossary-siddha-yoga.html

Better WhoIs
http://www.betterwhois.com

Google search terms used:

common yoga terminology
domain name appraisal

However much someone is willing to pay for it. ;)

To elaborate on alexander-ga's comment...

The value of any URL (domain name) is based on many
things; for instance, from:

http://www.adnappraisals.com/

1.) Industry and Commercial Use – Does the name have
great industry potential? Is the name suited to be
built into a commercial web site or another like a
non-profit orginization?

2.) Name Awareness and Brand Recognition – Is the name
easily to remember? Is it easy to trademark and highly
brandable?

3.) Character Length of Name – How long is the name?
In most cases, the fewer amount of characters in the
name, the higher the value.


I don't think (based only on the domain name itself)
that channelyoga.com has much industry potential, nor
is it that outstanding, etc.

In other words, someone could get whattayoga.com or
betteryoga.com or getyouryoga.com or yyyoga.com, etc.
for $8 instead of buying channelyoga.com from you.

I owned and ran an ISP for 5 years, and even own a
dozen or so domain names, but of those, maybe only
one or two have any potential of commercial value
by themselves.

Now, if you developed the business, then the domain
name becomes part of the "corporate" identity, and
can add to the value of the whole business if you
decided to sell it.  So, the value of the domain
name could be worth far more if kept and grown with
the business, than it could be by itself.