Domain appraisal tools are garbage. Here's why:
Are you looking to buy a domain and wonder what it should sell for? Or do you want to buy domains & resell them? Chances are you'll stumble across domain appraisal tools. They're existing pretty much since there is a market for domain sales. Their promise - using algorithms to estimate how much a given domain is worth. But does it work? Short answer: no, they are garbage. If you want a long answer, continue reading.
Why did I even test those? Since we're working on Indiebrands it's important for me to understand how to price our products. And to do it we need to understand the market. But on my mission to find the best appraisal tool I quickly realised it will be more complicated than expected:
The Data collected
For this little article, I tested 11 of our domains. From 5 letter to 9 letter domains & including the TLDs .com, .io, .co, .so. The tools I used are GoDaddy, Nameworth, Estibot, Freevaluator, Epik, PC Domains.
This is where I "learned" those 11 domains are either worth $ 585 or $ 80,650. Can't help but think of the different price targets for Bitcoin. Already it's become pretty clear why the industry isn't sold on those tools. This is also why I stuck to only testing 11 different names instead of more. So don’t expect this to be a “scientific study” - the purpose was to figure out if those tools are really that bad. And this question is answered.
This statistic alone should clarify why domain appraisals tools are bad. As much as I want to believe that we’ll sell those domains for $ 80.000 I’m pretty certain this won’t happen. And on the other hand, if we only sold them for $ 585 we wouldn't be in business. For context, we have those domains listed for a total value of $ 5,900.
Besides that, I've investigated
- How different TLD's compare
- What the influence length has
- What it takes to build a domain appraisal tool
- The opinion of the industry around domain sales
- and last but not least: A comparison between all tools I've tested
So check out the full article: Domain appraisal tools are garbage. Here's why
Cheers,
The market is totally illiquid. You sell a domain for what someone is willing to pay for it or it doesn't sell basically. I recently sold one for about $700 and I see that the buyer put it up for resale almost immediately. If he wants to speculate at that price level then fine or maybe at the last minute, he didn't need it - don't know and don't care.
That’s a good way to put it. The fact that the market behaves this way also makes it basically impossible to build a good domain appraisal tool. You would need an estimation „chance of sales per 1000 users seen“ - or something like that.
For everyone else, if you like a particular domain just go ahead with that, you don't need a perfect expensive domain for success. Domain names play very little role in product success, its the product features which play bigger role. Most of the time users don't manually type domain names, they choose from bookmarks OR they click on a link.
Dont buy extremely expensive domains, they are really waste of money. Everytime I read someone talking about why they purchased a super expensive domain name, it sounds like they are not confident and they are trying to justify.
Making a simple and easy to use product and quickly going to market is more important.
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.
He has a valid argument. But having a brandable memorable name can definitely help. Especially nowadays with limited attention spans. But spending north 5k for a domain is almost alway unreasonable imo.
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.