In some respects, as far as the forums go I may still be a "noobie". I honestly had no that there was a whole community of "webmsters" swapping $10, $20 crappy domains back and forth. can someone help me with this? Is it like Penny stocks? What is the use? Why is it worth anybody's time, money and Pay Pal charges to even seek out, buy or sell, a domain that is crap, and has no shot of type in traffic and has no marketability at all.? Can't you just register any old crap any day of the week for $8? After all this time on DP, and other forums, I still don't get it.
Well, it depends. Some domain name may appear to be crappy to you but it may appeal to others who see the potential. The domain name may go only so far on its own in terms of value but if it appeals to the right person who buys it, nuture and develop a site to the name, it could be the next best thing. A domain name is nothing without being attached to a site. I know that you can register a domain name cheap but the ones you are looking for may not be available so that is where buying pre-existing ones come into relevance. Some people are looking for SERP value and PR and some older domain names may have that especially if they were used for some sites and have gone abandoned. New ones are pretty much unknown to the world. Then again there may be some people who buys domain name in bulk then realized that they have outdone themselves and try to sell what they do not need and are happy to at least cover the cost of investment. Some domain names such as those .info could have been registered for $0.99 and if they are sold for $10, they make a profit of $9.01. If they use Paypal Personal account, there is no charges if the other party pays through a Paypal balance.
cuz the domain name's already registered, and the buyer wants that name. so they buy it from the current owner.
I would add a vice versa here, people who believe they have crappy domain names when they are truly gems... and vice versa
All good points that I have accepted, but I have followed quite a few transactions over the months to get a feel for is going on with these type of sales, and what I find mostly, months later, is a dead site, or an MFA, or see the same domains for sale months later without any additional content. I know that I , like most of you, can look at a domain, no matter what site is on it, and know what I can do with it, within 5 seconds, based on my ideas, what I already have, or what a client is looking for. And I also see a lot of nice site designs, and then they go out looking for a $10 domain. It seems to me that so many people are buying and selling based on some personal belief of what is possible, and not on real world applications of the web, and how people surf, or what is truly marketable in the world outside of Webmaster forums. I also don't understand sites or domains that are 3 or more years old with any amount of traffic and development, selling for $25. Even a crap domain (.com), with 3 years of indexing, and content on it, with hosting fees is worth more than $25. It just seems to me that some of the transactions, (for the seller) is hardly worth the effort of typing them on the keyboard. Also the whole asking for revenue statements is just ludicrous. Yes if you are paying "X" x revenue, I can see it, but if you are not, it's stupid. Doesn't anyone else have any skills to be able to say, regardless of what this knob did with it, this is what I can do with it. Why are revenue statements so important when the quality and experience of the owner of the "Business" is not. If you are buying a domain or website, based on revenue, and the seller is light years ahead of you when it comes to marketing, you will never see the revenue of the seller , and it will probably go down. I get people all the time that come to us and say, "This website was making x$'s when I purchased it, I have the paperwork to prove it, why is the revenue going down?"
Yes, I fully agree with you as to the revenue statement. I just don't buy the 'future earnings will match that of the past'. There are just a lot of factors involved. I just have this suspicious feeling when someone tries to sell of a profitable website based on just supposedly 1 month of past results. In the real world, when companies are bought and sold, they are based on the share price and failing which the Net Asset Value would be taken. When I buy a website, I look at how relevant the domain name is and the web designs, I don't bother about how much money it makes because it appears that although some may show you the revenue, no one shows you the net profit or even the expenses incurred each month to ensure that revenue level. Some website can run itself but some depends on the one who runs them such as a blog or a forum. If there is a change of ownership, the character of the site would change and it may lead to a fall or raise of income. That's why I avoid high priced sites with little or low appeal to me. I go for the low priced ones so at least if it fails, I am not so much out of pocket and besides I would most probably put in at least several hundred of dollars of investment into it. Well, in the end, if we are the customers, we should only buy what appeals to us and use the valuation which we are comfortable with.
Personally, I find the prices at which domains are sold on forums to be low. If I spend time developing the website, I usually earn more.
Yes, they are probably low because they are undeveloped domain names. Of course, with work done on it, the value should definitely go up based on the value-added.