When I was going through my Digg phase, I came up with the brilliant </sarc> idea to create a clone of it. You know, because clones are always better, right? </moresarc> I found a piece of open source software called Pligg and I was off and running on my next idea.
I purchased the domain name dailythump.com for this fleeting project. My reasoning was users could thump up or thump down a story similar to how Digg users vote. After adding some articles I re-purposed from an article directory I was adding on to another site, I was pretty much done with this one. It withered on the vine.
After tinkering with some minor customizations to the Pligg software, and not being able to get the site how I wanted, I scrapped the entire site. I was never super crazy about the name either, which is not typical since I’m usually super picky about names, so I decided I’d throw it up on Sedo and see what happens. I figured if it sold before it expired, great. If not, I was going to let it go.
Months later and I received an email from Sedo that my DailyThump domain had sold and instructed me to begin the transfer process. Huh? I have plenty of domains for sale, and this is the one that sells? I wasn’t complaining because I had put it up for sale at $500, but there was a problem. My expiration date had already expired. Oops.
My domain that had just been sold was now in redemption by GoDaddy. I had to pay well over a hundred dollars for the redemption fee and another year for the domain just to hand it over to someone else.
GoDaddy now says the redemption fee is $80, but I’m almost positive I paid nearly twice that. Unfortunately I could not get into my old account to check because I’ve moved all my domains elsewhere years ago, and the password reset button asks for an account name. Don’t remember your account name? Then input a domain on file with us. I don’t have one. OK GoDaddy, I get it. You don’t want me poking around in my old account because I broke up with you.
It was still worth it to pay the fees to get $500, but after the $50 (at the time) Sedo fee, the couple years of annual domain renewals, and the redemption fee, I think I cleared a little more than half of my sales price. A sale is still a sale.
This prompted me to switch gears a bit. I’ve had a habit of coming up with an idea, buying a domain, adding it to a hosting account, and throwing up a site before moving on to the next one. Going forward, I decided any domain I hadn’t put much effort into in awhile, I would add to my Sedo account to sell.
As you can imagine, my Sedo account has swelled a bit with domains for sale since I’m a fantastic finisher. Each sale is only for the domain name, but by having a shell of a site up, maybe it will give a potential buyer an idea of what they could do with it.
Originally I struggled with letting go of my sites/domains. Even if these ideas were short lived, at one brief moment in time, they had my attention because I thought it was a great idea. I’m also very selective about choosing a domain (sometimes I take days to decide), so it’s not easy to part with them either.
In the end I’ve decided to price each domain at a number in which I’m comfortable selling them. I understand domain pricing can be extremely subjective, at least it is to me. I’m not using any type of calculator to come up with value. My prices are all about how I feel about them. To be honest, I don’t want to sell any of them, so the prices I set boils down to what number would it take for me to walk away from an idea and its domain completely. Hint: Not cheap.
Since each domain is tied to a project I’ve never completed, I’m sure you’ll be seeing many of them mentioned here real soon. In the meantime, check out that Pligg software I mentioned earlier. If you like how Digg works and have an idea of your own brewing, this could be what you’re next site runs on.