.CO.UK Domain Sale - £87,500 - at Domain Focus in London

Large .co.uk sales reporteed

[dougs]

www.asap.co.uk bought www.fly.co.uk at yesterdays Domain Focus event for £87,500, adding to their portfolio that also includes www.carrentals.co.uk. It was the largest sale of the day by a long way, the next bigggest sale was employment.co.uk for £17,000

Of the 60 names on sale, 19 sold in the auction, 21 had offers of which I believe 10 sold afterwards

Regards

Doug

[dougs]

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System: The following message was spliced on to this thread from: http://www.webmasterworld.com/domain_names/3444907.htm [webmasterworld.com] by webwork - 8:27 am on Sep. 8, 2007 (utc -5)

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are the uk .co.uk domains getting real value

2 sales this week one at www.fly.co.uk at $175,000 and recycle.co.uk at $308,000

Doug

[Webwork]

It's interesting to see the growing number of "domain events".

Anyone attend the Domain Focus event in London? If so, tell us about your personal experience of the event.

[dougs]

There were about 100 people who turned up on the Thursday of the event. I am not a domainerer but there were the big guys from Fabulous, TrafficZ, Sedo etc plus a large amount of people who seemed to have all of the best .co.uk's in the world and many of the best .com's. There were some interesting talks during the day, but a lot of my time was spent networking and chatting. Absolutely fascinating for me to see what the big boys were doing in the industry.

Thursday night about 40 of us went out for dinner, courtesy of Sedo. again fascinating.

Friday was some more talks, including a brief seo overview from JasonD. It became apparent that the domainer guys have no idea about seo.

The auction kicked off in the afternoon and I do feel that many people had come to watch. This was the first ever .co.uk auction sale and hence there were about 50 people registered to buy, but about 150 in the room.

Most of the domains reserved at £10000 were bid on, some sold, some didn't hit the reserve but sold later. The big domains www.sport.co.uk, www.sex.co.uk, www.fly.co.uk etc all had reserves set above £50,000 and hence I believe many people were never going to bid on these. No one was willing to risk that type of money in an unknown market.

www.fly.co.uk was purchased on behalf of www.asap.co.uk as it a perfect fit for their business. The bidding on this domain started at £50,000 and very quickly finished off at £87,500 ($175,000)

Personally I felt it was very succesfull, even though there were few very big sales. But I put this down to it being the first ever one and many people unsure what to do.

I also know there were some large sales that occured because of people meeting each other, but these were sales not in the actual auction.

Regards

Doug

[Crush]

I have never paid more than $5000 for a domain with a ton of backlinks. I can see where you are coming from Doug but as you say it is an untested market. Kudos for jumping in to see how deep it is for us all and best of luck if it is development or a resale at a later date.

[ToprankMarketing]

$175,000 is certainly a high price for a domain name but if you can turn it into a multi-million dollar website it will be worth more then what you paid. The domain name itself is short and sweet and easy to remember.

I guess the real way of knowing its value is to put a site up and see what traffic it can generate.

Ben

[GerBot]

for a 3 letter .co.uk that is not only a word but a commercial word at that.
totally worth it.
even if you just have to look at from an SEO perspective, who are you going to link to fly.co.uk or buy-cheap-tickets-online-abc-today.co.uk?

[JasonD]

The Domain Focus event was superb.

It definately had its teethng troubles, but thankfully they had lots of Bonjela and the boys from Domain Focus pulled it off admirably.

I am afraid I had to leave to see a client before the auction started (congratulations Doug on the fly.co.uk purchase) but below are some of my take away points.

The Domaining industry is extremely well established within the UK but is still immature compared to the English speaking dot com marketplace. This shows it has massive room for further and future growth.

A small number (more than a dozen, less than 2 dozen) of domain acquisiation businesses control the majority of UK domainer registrations.

The domainer business (as a whole) is extrmely mature in most business areas but is extremely immature in one major area. The part between registering a domain and selling a domain is handled in a woefully inadequate manner.

Times will change but at the moment it is interesting that there are some businesses out there, investing (let's be honest here) very large sums of money, who understand not just the value within a domain name itself but also are proven at working the domain name to its true potential!

[game]

Yes, well done to the Domain Focus team

yes, it could have been more structured and better managed, so there are lessons to learn to make future events live up to expectations

but the reality was most of the top domainers, particularly UK, were present and doing business, and were complemented by the SEO guys (missing in January)

Not enough of the domains sold in the auction, with the general agreement that reserves were too high, but never the less fly.co.uk (£87,500 by www.asap.co.uk) and employment.co.uk (£17,000) made the grade. Well done buyers and sellers.

+ thanks to Matt and the Sedo team for the evening drinks

[edited by: Webwork at 2:01 pm (utc) on Sep. 10, 2007]
[edit reason] Link to non-major media sites "for news and info" are prohibited by TOS [/edit]

[dougs]

Sold prices

[sedo.co.uk...]

I believe there were another 100-300K of sales that occured before and after the DF auction

Doug