WW.com Sold in Private

http://www.domaininvesting.com/ww-com-sold-private/

by larrys • 12 years ago

58 56 12 years ago

larrys10• 12 years ago

Perhaps if Jacques is not willing to give the price that he sold the name for he could mention the % that the broker received for the sale and/or the gross commission.

Edit: I'm curious why the HN handle of the seller was removed from the post. To me that is an added point of interest and relevant.

dang• 12 years ago

In general, HN tries to focus on content, not personalities. So this was a clear case for reverting to the article title, even though you're right that jacquesm is the only reason why people here (including me!) would find it interesting.

It sometime happens that a story makes it to the front page because of some bait that was added to the title (in this case, to add social curiosity where intellectual interest was lacking), whereupon a moderator removes the bait from the title. This is not a bad pattern if you think about it. It's ok for the front page to have a few such stories, but they shouldn't dominate it. And once a story makes the front page, it should stand on its own.

larrys10• 12 years ago

In this case I agree with you (stands on its own) but otoh I think in terms of some of the major contributors to HN a less interesting story is often worth reading just for that fact.

As the person who posted the story I would have posted it regardless of whether Jacques was involved or not. But of course I definitely recognized that if I included his name it would have a much better chance of garnering interest.

jacquesm17• 12 years ago

I totally agree with the sentiment here, applying that even-handedly is going to be hard though. Plenty of articles about frequent HN contributors had the HN handle in the title, and in the future you're going to have to decide between 'original titles only' and this 'emphasize content, not personalities' policy.

Two samples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4328367

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3214397

But those were not on 'your watch' so I'm 100% on board with your new policy.

Quite a few blog posts carry the name of the blogger in the domain as well, which emphasizes personality rather than content, that's going to be harder to get rid of.

Anyway, I didn't even expect this to be on HN at all, it's been a roller coaster month of negotiations and traveling, I'm happy it's done. Now to repair the website, amazing how many dependencies on a domain name creep in over the years!

jacquesm17• 12 years ago

That's not really fair to Tom, (since it might affect his ability to negotiate in the future), but let's just say that I would happily recommend him to anybody, his rates are reasonable and he works really hard (which in the world of brokers is a welcome change). We got close to selling 3 times, and in the end I got a deal that I'm pretty happy with. Let's just say that since I bought ww.com with the proceeds of gameplay.com, which in turn I bought for $12 I would be highly surprised if I ever say that kind of ROI again in my life.

larrys10• 12 years ago

I own one of these things as well.

For the benefit of others on HN although I've never received a quote from a broker to market a 2l which I own I have on other domains. Generally anywhere from 7 to 15%. I've also had brokers take a haircut to close a deal.

On the buy side godaddy had recently sold one of my names (I almost blew them off but found they were clueless enough that it really worked to my advantage) and I'm seeing they get 10% when they represent sellers.

haptiK• 12 years ago

It says on your own website that WW.com it was sold for 3000000. I'm confused.

drcode2• 12 years ago

Seems like a bad time to be buying domains, since the new TLDs are going to shift the supply/demand landscape.

jacquesm17• 12 years ago

Which is exactly why I decided to sell.

ohashi• 12 years ago

Congrats on the sale.

larrys10• 12 years ago

I'd be curious if you could do a post on that. I'm in the business and while I can't predict the future I don't see it that way. At least in the short term long term of course anything is possible obviously.

While to others it might sound like you are taking a hit my guess is that you simply got a good enough number that you decided not to go for door number two. Which could be 5 years down the road or never.

The market for this type of name is basically the following:

a) A non chinese domain investor (good luck getting anything north of 350k from one of those).

b) A chinese investor (in which case all bets are off after all they buy numeral domains for ridiculous amounts). I've sold to a ton of these guys.

c) A startup (but not going to pay a million for a domain).

d) Some company that needs those initials.

e) Some major company that needs a brand name. And hopefully doesn't have a trademark but has a budget.

As such (as we both know) you can wait forever for the right person or company to come along. So if someone throws you a million(s) for the name you are going to think long and hard about not taking the money.

And the fact that, say, some billion dollar company wants it doesn't mean they will part with millions to buy it.

Anyway congratulations.

dfischer• 12 years ago

I have a list of domains I've gathered over the years. What would you recommend doing if I wanted to see which are valuable? And secondly how do I go about finding buyers?

joelrunyon3• 12 years ago

A lot of people feel that .com's will be more valuable with the new TLD structures potentially confusing people - I take it you feel the opposite way?

larrys10• 12 years ago

"Seems like a bad time to be buying domains"

In general, buying a great domain with the hope of selling it later for more money is a bad idea. Unless you can steal it and the chance of that happening is slim. And you can wait 5 or 10 years or never for the "right" buyer to come along.

You need a large number of domains to be able to hold them and sell them later on if that is what you are trying to do.

orik• 12 years ago

the new gTLD's are pretty terrible though. I don't think the value of a good old .com domain is going to shift too much.

drcode2• 12 years ago

I don't know... That's kind of like saying "People will always wear business suits" which is true... until it isn't anymore.

general_failure4• 12 years ago

just takes a little time to get used to them. before you know it, people will move away from just pure .com.

samstave2• 12 years ago

Wow, you weren't kidding.

http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/program-status/delegated-string...

Jesus - who came up with these?

Also - anyone know where you can register any domains with these new delegations? Is it on a registrar-by-registrar basis?

spking• 12 years ago

Depends on what you do with it. If you develop on it and the domain is a logical, obvious descriptor of the app or service you offer then it can act as a multiplier of the underlying value of the product.

The new TLDs are doing really poorly in terms of end-user adoption: http://www.ricksblog.com/2014/06/rick-schwartz-equation/

crisnoble• 12 years ago

I just went to ww.com, clicked translate and it said the following (originally in Chinese) "Your domain name is for sale.

A good domain only have the economic strength and strategic vision of the business or individual reservations!"

Was this what jacquesm had on there or is this post aquisition? For some reason I found it quite funny.

jacquesm17• 12 years ago

Yes, it's funny, and that's post acquisition.

Let me explain what drives this process. The buyer here is a Chinese company that somehow magically can move millions of $US to the other side of the world. Most Chinese companies, even those that have lots of $US can not do that, they run into the $50K/year barrier that the Chinese central bank has set up.

So by buying domains abroad and then offering them to Chinese buyers that can not move their $ outside of China these people will make a substantial profit on their deal. And I don't think it takes too much imagination to figure out why they can move money out of China when everybody else can not.

samstave2• 12 years ago

Corruption?

unreal37• 12 years ago

Congrats to one of my favorite HN contributors. Hope you got something close to what you were asking.

Now if I can only sell my 2 letter domain for that...

jacquesm17• 12 years ago

Now if I can only sell my 2 letter domain for that...

I'm pretty sure you could. What domain do you have?

larrys10• 12 years ago

I understand that you said your broker did a good job for you so I'm sure others would want to contact him. For example the parent commenter.

But if you follow the links the site premiumurls.net redirects to twitter and the whois info is private (and why does it need to be?)

If he is really good at what he does then why is that, other than trying to operate in some kind of stealth mode?

How did you hear about him originally I can't find out that much about him. (I am finding that history records indicate a woman was attached to that domain name and it seems odd that someone would pick a .net like that..)

bokusiayam• 12 years ago

Outside of the get rich quick dopes who think they're going to strike it big, who cares about this? If I wanted to read about vapid people concerned only with making money out of thin air while doing nothing useful, I'd be reading SEO blogs. "It's worth a lot of money because people pay for it!!" is a pathetic excuse to give attention to something, especially on a site ostensibly for people with active brain cells.

josephschmoe• 12 years ago

Yo.

67726e3• 12 years ago

The exact same concept as holding onto a parking spot and waiting for someone to come along and pay for it. Despicable. I read most everything jacquesm writes and enjoy it, but how can you justify rent-seeking on a public resource?

jacquesm17• 12 years ago

You do realize that that 'parking spot' has had my highest income website on it for over a decade with about 100K visitors daily even at the low times?

Also, I'm not sure what you mean with 'public resource' in this context, domains are more like private registries held by semi-official companies that you can choose to do business with or not.

There is a near infinity of them, shorter ones are obviously in short supply but to date I've never ever had a problem buying a domain for a new project for $8 or so.

67726e3• 12 years ago

In that case, my apologies, this is the edge-case of a domain-transfer of a domain that was truly being used. The way I had read things, it sounded as though you parked a two-letter domain on a sketchy web-cam site.

And regarding the public resource, it really is a public resource. You may have to go through a registrar, but it is open for any and all to register. In the case of "squatters", it is the same as attempting to rent a parking space. Something meant for the public to use which requires a nominal fee.

larrys10• 12 years ago

"You do realize that that 'parking spot' has had my highest income website on it for over a decade with about 100K visitors daily even at the low times?"

Why even "apologize" like that? You don't have to.

For some reason people seem to think that there could be a cost effective way to truly determine what the best use of each and every domain name is and allocate it to the truly deserving users!.

And that if that was even done then a user with more money wouldn't then come along later and buy it from that person by paying them money.

You know I remember way back in 2001 - I think it was. And I would have attorney's contact me wanting to know if they could use law.com for their website. You know as if they just woke up one morning, had this idea, and nobody else thought of using law.com for the same purpose. They were the first! That's how little they knew about the internet prior to that thought.

Likewise, many startups seem frustrated that the name that they want is being held for ransom by some other person. As if nobody else would have come along and used it for their business and they wouldn't be able to use it.

general_failure4• 12 years ago

Why doesn't someone have a cap on domain name sales? What sense does it make to make this some sort of land grab promoting squatters.

(note that ww.com was not squatted on, i know that. i am just asking in general why a price cap is a bad idea for resale.)

fiatmoney• 12 years ago

A cap would be impossible to enforce; ICANN can't monitor someone forking over the cap + a briefcase of cash between two buyers god only knows where.

And super-valuable domains are minuscule portion of overall domain sales, it simply wouldn't be worthwhile.

And it need not be a "sale of a domain" at all; it can be the sale of "ww.com corp", which owns the domain, without any domain transfer at all.

joelrunyon3• 12 years ago

Are there caps on any other purchases out there?

Should we start capping the amounts that startups can be acquired for? If FB is willing to pay 1B for Instagram, 19B for Whatsapp, or more - who's to say that they can't spend their money the way they want to?

general_failure4• 12 years ago

Well, if we start treating domain names as a public resource, then caps might start making more sense. It's like any other regulation.

AFAIK, there are regulations already for how much you can pollute your environment, usage of rivers, height of buildings, rearchitecting your house etc.

jacquesm17• 12 years ago

For one caps are absolutely non-enforceable, second it would be setting a pretty bad precedent to retro-actively set a cap on something long after the trading has started. I'm not aware of a precedent like that. Imagine a cap on land prices. Or a cap on gold or any other good that is freely traded.

Next thing you know you're going to have to declare your 'five year plan' when you register a domain...

WW.com Sold in Private

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