£250,000 for a .co.uk domain

is it really that valuable

[Shak]

I have been in negotiations to acquire a very good "generic" 1 word .co.uk domain for the last few days.

Now contrary to popular belief, I do know actually know a thing or 2 about .co.uk domains.

However there was no asking price for this specific domain, and instead they were looking for serious offers,

so I offered £10,000 (which is quite a lot for generic .co.uk domains in the current climate)

anyway they will NOT even entertain offers less than £250,000 , which is some SERIOUS money.

Now I appreciate it is an awesome domain, but in my opinion NO generic .co.uk can warrant that sort of money, not if I am buying anyway.

The thing that puzzled me was this was not a bargaining figure, and furthermore I am NOT even sure the owner will actually sell for £250,000.

really left me baffled, or He knows something which I dont.

Shak

[NFFC]

I really can't imagine a UK domain worth anywhere near that figure. Yahoo.co.uk isn't even worth £250,000 IMHO

[Shak]

exactly as I thought, and I explained to the owner the following:

"With a 250,000 budget I would be looking at driving over 2 million visitors, combined with coverage at places such as CNN, BBC and National media) and thats b4 the SEOs get their hands on it :)

and let me assure you that type-ins would never come close to what a budget of 250k managed correctly could achieve in terms of branding and more importanatly targeted traffic.

Shak

[makemetop]

Let them dream - no way can any .co.uk be worth that money!

[Shak]

every once in a while it comes true.

I hold the record if I remember correctly at £245,000 (but this was more of "gotta have by a USA company" with more money than sense, and took a lot of time negotiating)

Shak

[sem4u]

I know that some insurance term domain names are rented out for high sums each month as some people just type these names into their browsers and add .com or .co.uk

[DrCool]

That is crazy. You would need a ton of type-in traffic or a great branding campaign to make it worth that much. It would take a lot for me to pay more than $100 for a domain.

[Shak]

£10,000+ .co.uk domains are being sold on quite a regular basis here in the UK.

Shak

[diddlydazz]

That is serious re-mortgage money :) it would have to be something not only generic but unbelievably brandable to pull that sort of cash.

If they gave that figure due to previous offers then there is hope for us all ;)

Dazz

[Shak]

If they gave that figure due to previous offers then there is hope for us all ;)

I think that is actually true,

Shak

[diddlydazz]

Maybe, I can't see any other reason for quoting such a high figure unless they have been seriously misguided by their friend's brother's cousin :)

Dazz

[VictorE]

Makes me wonder if perhaps he has a large investment in the domain that he is trying to recoup. Is he the original owner?

[gsx]

I remember 4x4 being sold for £17,000. I thought a major offroad car dealer or manufacturer may have bought it because of the price, but it is actually a travel/foreign property purchase site. Now in my mind, 4x4 for a car dealer would be worth a lot, but for almost anything else it would be worth about £30.

[rcjordan]

Well before the bubble, I was allowed to peek at a $1M US contract for a dotcom. The contract also stipulated that the site pay residuals of 10% of yearly revenue. Furthermore, if the annual residual fell below $100k the original owner could exercise an option to purchase it back for $250k. Yeow! Talk about pressure to perform.

[cfx211]

We currently lease a one word domain that is a .com, that averages about 80k visits a month to us, and it has to be all type ins because they have no SE presence. We are paying pennies for each visit from that domain, but those pennies become quite significant over the course of a year.

If you actually take that out over 10-20 years then you could image a US $500k valuation from an owner's perspective.

Would we ever pay that for the domain? Never, because it is a non significant source of traffic for us, and no one here would believe any domain to be worth a half million to our business. On the other hand if we stay in this deal for 10 years then maybe we should have bought it. Its the old buy vs. lease debate.

Maybe your owner looks at this domain as an annuity that is only worth losing for real money. His risk is that in 2 years no one is willing to pay whatever he is getting per referral now.

[cornwall]

Someone was trying to sell "britain.co.uk" last year for over a million, but they did not seem to get anywhere

Currently I get a DNS error if I try the site, and Whois gives, would you believe it, a firm of lawyers as the registrant

[Crazy_Fool]

i'm not really into buying and selling domains for big money, but i do have a couple of very good names that should be worth serious money. i've turned down 4 figure offers for them but never had 5 figures offered. i know that eventually they'll make 5 figures, maybe 6 .... my problem is that i've got zero interest in trading domain names like this .... i'd be happy to sell them for maybe a low 5 figure sum and let someone else do the selling when the time is right .... if they make 6 or 7 figures out of those domains, bloody good luck to them ...