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Takes me back to 2006
- Thread starter Cav
- Start date
Just in case you cannot view the link,..,......
Back in 1995, before the dotcom boom, James Coakes received some shrewd advice from a friend. “He told me the internet was going to be very big,” he recalls, “and that a lot of businesses would need good domain names for their websites. He said they’d be worth a lot of money to the right companies. So I bought a few likely-sounding names for about £30 each.
It was a good move. Before long, a number of other people had switched on to this upcoming investment area, and by the end of 1996, he says, the best names had all gone.
Coakes runs a corporate events company, and initially the domain names he bought related to his own industry. Then he acquired other generic business names, such as auditing.co.uk and valeting.co.uk.
I bought those 10 years ago and am still holding on to them. As a pair, they have to be worth £10,000 now. I also own thebusiness.co.uk and fit.co.uk – I bought the latter recently for a few thousand pounds from a company which went bust, and I’d want £30,000 for it.
He estimates he has so far spent under £10,000 on his domain name portfolio, including registration and annual renewal fees. He currently owns around 100 names and sells a few each year via sedo.com, a domain-name trading website, typically for about £2,000 each.His best ever sale was for the name cupid.co.uk, which he bought in the mid-1990s for a few pounds and sold last year for £8,000 . . . to a dating agency, naturally. These days he buys only very good names, and will gladly spend into the thousands for a really top one.
New businesses are finding it hard to come up with good names which are still available, so there’s a current trend for obscure combinations of words which don’t mean anything, for example ‘Orange Monkey’.
Such names, he feels, don’t do those businesses any good, because they confuse potential customers. They were bad investments for the same reason. He also wouldn’t buy a domain with a suffix such as .it – chosen by some IT companies, for obvious reasons – because it’s the country code for Italy, and so less suitable for a UK-based firm.
I’m surprised more people don’t make offers for names that are already registered. They’re afraid of getting ripped off, but there are really good names available for under £1,000. Once you own the domain, it’s an asset and I believe prices will only ever go up.”The .com and .co.uk domains are the most sought-after and valuable, but good names with those suffixes are ever harder to find, so new ones are constantly cropping up. One such is.biz. But according to Coakes it hasn’t really caught on, because “it has a touch of the Del Boys about it”. He explains: “If your site has a .co.uk suffix, it says ‘we’re a serious business’.
His portfolio concentrates on the .co.uk domain, as the more expensive .com is now largely out of his price bracket.He claims it is impossible to overestimate the value to a business of a good domain name. His own company uses teambuilding.co.uk, as it runs teambuilding events for corporate customers. Nearly half its traffic comes to the site by prospective clients putting the word “teambuilding” directly into their internet browser. “This is how a lot of people locate services nowadays, and for us it equates to half a million pounds’ worth of revenue each year.
Although the dot-com bubble burst five years ago, domain names still provide excellent investment opportunities, Coakes says. It’s more difficult now, but you can still pick up for a few pounds a name that is likely to be worth thousands.“But as with any other sort of investment, you can’t just wander into it and make money. You need to immerse yourself. Every day I look at domain names, keep an eye on the registers, watch for renewal dates. There are many websites for registering, buying and selling names and you have to catch out someone who has forgotten to renew a good name, or grab one fast from a company which has gone bust.
By using basic commercial common sense you can buy a name for a fraction of what it’s worth in the market, and because the entry and upkeep costs are low, you can afford to hold on to them for a long time.”If he sold all his domain names today, he says, he would make more than £1m. But he’s in no hurry: “This market hasn’t yet matured. There are only a handful of people trading in it, getting into position ahead of the main wave.”
Back in 1995, before the dotcom boom, James Coakes received some shrewd advice from a friend. “He told me the internet was going to be very big,” he recalls, “and that a lot of businesses would need good domain names for their websites. He said they’d be worth a lot of money to the right companies. So I bought a few likely-sounding names for about £30 each.
It was a good move. Before long, a number of other people had switched on to this upcoming investment area, and by the end of 1996, he says, the best names had all gone.
Coakes runs a corporate events company, and initially the domain names he bought related to his own industry. Then he acquired other generic business names, such as auditing.co.uk and valeting.co.uk.
I bought those 10 years ago and am still holding on to them. As a pair, they have to be worth £10,000 now. I also own thebusiness.co.uk and fit.co.uk – I bought the latter recently for a few thousand pounds from a company which went bust, and I’d want £30,000 for it.
He estimates he has so far spent under £10,000 on his domain name portfolio, including registration and annual renewal fees. He currently owns around 100 names and sells a few each year via sedo.com, a domain-name trading website, typically for about £2,000 each.His best ever sale was for the name cupid.co.uk, which he bought in the mid-1990s for a few pounds and sold last year for £8,000 . . . to a dating agency, naturally. These days he buys only very good names, and will gladly spend into the thousands for a really top one.
New businesses are finding it hard to come up with good names which are still available, so there’s a current trend for obscure combinations of words which don’t mean anything, for example ‘Orange Monkey’.
Such names, he feels, don’t do those businesses any good, because they confuse potential customers. They were bad investments for the same reason. He also wouldn’t buy a domain with a suffix such as .it – chosen by some IT companies, for obvious reasons – because it’s the country code for Italy, and so less suitable for a UK-based firm.
I’m surprised more people don’t make offers for names that are already registered. They’re afraid of getting ripped off, but there are really good names available for under £1,000. Once you own the domain, it’s an asset and I believe prices will only ever go up.”The .com and .co.uk domains are the most sought-after and valuable, but good names with those suffixes are ever harder to find, so new ones are constantly cropping up. One such is.biz. But according to Coakes it hasn’t really caught on, because “it has a touch of the Del Boys about it”. He explains: “If your site has a .co.uk suffix, it says ‘we’re a serious business’.
His portfolio concentrates on the .co.uk domain, as the more expensive .com is now largely out of his price bracket.He claims it is impossible to overestimate the value to a business of a good domain name. His own company uses teambuilding.co.uk, as it runs teambuilding events for corporate customers. Nearly half its traffic comes to the site by prospective clients putting the word “teambuilding” directly into their internet browser. “This is how a lot of people locate services nowadays, and for us it equates to half a million pounds’ worth of revenue each year.
Although the dot-com bubble burst five years ago, domain names still provide excellent investment opportunities, Coakes says. It’s more difficult now, but you can still pick up for a few pounds a name that is likely to be worth thousands.“But as with any other sort of investment, you can’t just wander into it and make money. You need to immerse yourself. Every day I look at domain names, keep an eye on the registers, watch for renewal dates. There are many websites for registering, buying and selling names and you have to catch out someone who has forgotten to renew a good name, or grab one fast from a company which has gone bust.
By using basic commercial common sense you can buy a name for a fraction of what it’s worth in the market, and because the entry and upkeep costs are low, you can afford to hold on to them for a long time.”If he sold all his domain names today, he says, he would make more than £1m. But he’s in no hurry: “This market hasn’t yet matured. There are only a handful of people trading in it, getting into position ahead of the main wave.”