Domain Appraisals

Domain Appraisals are primarily selling tools to help market the domains to the end consumer, as well as to help companies like NameMedia (owner of BuyDomains) low-ball domain sellers.  They aren’t likely to impress anyone with experience or success within the industry.  For the price of the appraisal, one could register several new domains at registrars such as GoDotYourself.com, or extend the registration of existing domains in that person’s portfolio by several years.  These are better ways to invest that money, IMO.

Furthermore, domain appraisals are notoriously unreliable.  For example, I’ve sold domains that appraised for little more than the registration fee sell for $800-$1,000.  I receive about 1-2 offers every month in the $1,000-$2,000 for a domain that GoDaddy a GoDaddy appraisal valued at $34.  Granted, that same domain has been appraised by other services to be worth over $125,000.  Similar domains have sold for between $50k and $250k.

Domain Parking

With a very small handful of exceptions (like Sex.com for example), parking doesn’t work.  I have a few dozen domains hosted on Parked.com’s “WhyPark” platform, which allows for some degree of customization.  It matters not, as Google has blacklisted everything on their servers and removed it from their indexes. Even domain names with 100% original content and high-quality inbound links have zero chance at ever seeing the light of day if hosted on one of WhyPark’s servers.

My undeveloped domains bring in very little revenue, and I’ve tried every parking service out there.  The domains in my portfolio are well above-average in terms of quality with a majority being exact keyword-match domains.

My advice to domainers new to the industry is to sell your names or develop them, but not waste too much time with parking or too much money on appraisals.