Internet Marketing

Domain name valuations or appraisals, as they are often known, are in our view a complete waste of time and money and serve only to make easy money by the sites offering them.

A domain name valuation or appraisal can never be accurate, because any domain name (like many things in life), are only ever worth what somebody is prepared to pay for them.

Sometimes, you will see sites offering to value a domain name, or even an entire domain name portfolio automatically. Just enter your names into their system and hey presto, they’ll come up with a magic figure that values your names!

With our own domain name portfolio, we ignore valuations. Each name is worth exactly what we paid for it – that’s £6 if it’s a .co.uk name and $6 if it’s a .com that we registered from new.

That doesn’t mean that we would ever sell a domain name for those amounts – simply that we buy to hold forever, with a view to developing them later on.

We have one name that generated £200,000 worth of business in it’s first year as a web site. What would that be worth if it could do that year after year, with no more work?

To us, it’s worth at least £1million – and that’s on the low side, assuming that its value is a mere 5 times what it generates for us each year.

Could we sell it for £1million? Unlikely. There isn’t one single domain name valuation service that even considers what the name makes as a developed site – and by developed, we mean bare basic information!

To another company in the same niche, the SAME name could be worth FAR more in terms of the sales it can generate. It only takes a little application and some bigger thinking.

A domain name valuation or appraisal is nothing more than an opinion and opinions are the cheapest things on earth. Ask anyone their opinion on anything and they will give it you free of charge, all day long, so why pay for a domain name valuation?

Most people wanting a domain name appraisal or valuation do so in the hope that they can turn the $6 they “invested” in a domain name into a big pile of cash, by offering their name for sale at somewhere like eBay and offering the “valuation” as evidence of the domain’s “real” worth.

Ask two domain name valuation services the value of any domain name and they will each come up with a different amount. It’s completely made up. There is no science to valuing domain names, despite what the domain name valuation sites tell you.

Our advice is to steer clear of these services and use the money you save to buy more great domains.

You have been warned.

NOTE:

Hollywood Internet Ltd cannot value your domain names.