I Used to Be a Dotcom Millionaire, Well at Least On Paper!

Written by Doug Dillard  
Filed under Domain Investing, Domaining, Featured Posts, Latest Posts, Popular, Tutorials

When I first started out online back in the late 90′s I got caught up in the big Domain Goldrush that was going on online. The big news back then was when some guy sold Business.com for millions of dollars and next thing you knew… domain speculators were buying up every domain name they could create, and I was one of them. At one point in early 2000 I owned over 3000 domain names. Yep… over 3000! I know that sounds crazy, and thinking back it probably was.

Actually the first 2 domains I ever registered were MakingMoneyOnline.com and MakeMoneyOnline.com. Then about a week after I registered them, some guy offered me $1000 for MakingMoneyOnline.com… but I turned him down. For the next week this guy kept bugging me about buying the domain, actually even calling me on my home phone leaving me messages. His final offer was for $35,000, which you can see by this site… I ended up not taking. In hindsight I probably should have taken it and used the money to finance my other domains, but oh well… at least I still have it now. Of course I made sure my wife was on board with me not taking the money… and she was
As for the rest of my domain collection… for a year or so everything was awesome… domains were easy to flip for a HEFTY PROFIT. I was selling several domains a week, many for between $1000 – $2000 each, and some for even more… which was a nice little profit. I believe the best place to sell domains back then was Afternic.com, which is still in business today, but with different owners.

One of the most popular parts of the site was their Domain Appraisal section, where I spent several hours each day. It was a free service where once you registered a domain name you could post it there and then other people would appraise your name for you. In all honesty… it was an absolute joke, as most of the people doing the appraisals were other domain owners, and everybody would give each other overinflated appraisals as they wanted you to do the same for their domains. I cannot tell you how many domains I owned back then, where people appraised them at $100K each. I remember one day I added up the averages of all my domain’s appraised values, and on paper I was worth about 8 million dollars. You can imagine how excited I was at the time… but unfortunately those millions never became a reality.
As I mentioned above… everything was awesome for about a year or so. People were spending crazy amounts of money on domain names to create all these startup businesses ventures with no real business plans, and the venture capitalist kept forking out the cash. At the time I was doing pretty well with my little domain reselling business.
Well as most of you know, those Free-Spending Days came to a sudden halt with the much publicized Dotcom Bust, and next thing you knew it was hard to get $100 for a premium domain name. Well those new darker times went on for quite some time and in the next few years my domain collection dwindled down significantly. Some I sold, and many I ended up letting expire as I did not want to keep paying the renewal fees. To be honest, a large percentage of the domains I originally registered were not really that great, but back then I just registered everything that popped in my head. Out of the original 3000 or so domains that I owned, after selling some and letting others expire… I ended up keeping a little over 400 domain names, and today I am down to just under 300.
So how is the domain reselling business doing in general nowadays? As for me, I have not really been trying to do much reselling lately. I have done an occasional flip here and there, but nothing much to speak of. As from my post last week you can see that I tried to test and see if I could sell a complete website via a post on Making Money Online Dot Com, but have not had much luck with that so far. I am actually thinking of adding a “Domains for Sale” section to our site and try and shrink my collection to a more reasonable amount, but we will see.
As for domain reselling around the world… it seems to be doing great. I am a HUGE fan of the website DNJournal.com, as they always have good articles about the industry, as well as great interviews with top domain resellers. But the main reason I check them out each week is they list many of the top domain name sales from the previous week, plus they keep a running total of the biggest sales for the entire year. Checkout some of the domains that sold last week and what they sold for:

Brazil.com – $500,000

Payment.com – $250,000

ChinaTours.com – $200,000

Payments.com – $150,000

Grafikkarte.de (“graphic card” in German) – $73,828

BookHotels.com – $70,500

iPal.com – $59,000

CouponNetwork.com – $59,000

LMK.com – $58,500

DomainAppraisal.com – $52,000

And if you think those were some crazy prices, checkout the top 10 sales so far for 2009

Toys.com – $5,100,000

Candy.com – $3,000,000

Fly.com – $1,760,000

Auction.com – $1,700,000

Webcam.com – $1,020,000

Server.com – $770,000

Brazil.com – $500,000

Talk.com – $500,000

Top.com – $464,750

Body.com – $400,000

So as you can see, even with this bad economy… there are still people and businesses spending BIG MONEY on premium domain names. Unfortunately, it is a little late to try and get into the game unless you know what you are doing and have a lot of money. But it is not impossible.
One option would be is if you could snag (register) yourself a great domain name that relates to a new industry that is just starting to develop. That might be worth a lot of money to you. One of my good buddies who I have done some domain reselling with over the years (who actually bought MakeMoneyOnline.com from me years back) registered the domain MyBlog.com. He registered it back when blogging just started becoming known. Well he ended up selling that domain a year or so later for $400,000. Now that was a pretty good return on his investment. So there is definitely possibilities out there, you just need to stay on top of the next new and greatest thing.