Selling a Domain Name

Does anyone have experience with this, and whether it works better to go through the service at GoDaddy, Sedo, or whatever?  Or is there someone I should hire for a percentage or something?  We’re talking likely a grand to three grand, though it’s not out of the question for it to fetch more from the right buyer.  There are a handful of people in the world who might really want it, so I would think it might be worth contacting them directly as part of the process.

Sometimes the logical buyer thing doesn’t work.  In 1996, we (well, I had nothing to do with the decision) picked the company name XTreme Computing as a play on ex-Stream, and because it seemed cool.  Xtreme was used then, like xtreme sports, but not widely.  Now it’s on every product and has been massively overused since, well, shortly after we started out.  Xtreme.com had been snatched up and squatted since the earliest days of domain availability.  Someone beat us to xtremecomputing.com by about two months, which was annoying, especially in light of the foot dragging with which I’d been faced.  We ended up with xtremecomp.com, which is a completely meaningless domain name, but has the benefit of not being as long as the other one or as slobbered over by would-be buyers as xtreme.

Eventually I got a notice that xtremecomputing.com was for sale.  I believe it was $400, which is quite cheap.  I was tempted, but didn’t have the money to justify it, and felt no overwhelming need for it.  It is for sale to this day, several years later.  Or again, perhaps.  The seller wouldn’t budge on the price.  heck, maybe $400 is what I offered, but the asking was more.  I forget.

Meanwhile, in 1999 I came up with a domain that I was shocked wasn’t already taken, given the explosion of “xtreme” names.  It was better than any of the above except xtreme.com itself.  It would have been a better name for the company.  I figured it for software marketing, a future name change, or it could also have worked for selling hardware.  Partners thought it was cool but I was the only one ever actually interested in making use of it, and even in our heyday year we were starting the slow motion crumble that I managed to prolong until this year.

I wouldn’t mind still having a couple of other domains we got back when: beelines.com and beelines.net.

In the internet craze, our already fragmented idea of who we were and what we should do took another dimension.  One of the partners thought we should create some kind of online portal or something, for which we got those domains.  Nobody was ever clear on what exactly we should do, and nobody wanted to do actual work on it, least of all that partner, and nobody liked my idea of a site for small businesses.  I think I was picturing a local small business portal for people to find things and as a source of useful information to businesses.  Naw, it would never fly, too much out there already going that direction, whatever.  The partner most wanting us to go internet and least wanting to work on it was being an underpants gnome: buy a good domain, ???, sell out for millions.

I eventually canceled them when paying the renewals was onerous (which $35 should never be) and there seemed to be no point.  I also released some .net and .org and differently spelled variants along the way, hanging on only to the core domain and the one special one.

Anyway, enough history.  Apart from seeing what people might say, probably nothing, I’ll go poke a couple of those sites with a stick and pick one so I can get on with it.  In the meantime, I’ve managed to move my version from 5th or 6th to 3rd on Google, and am attempting to give it some page rank.

1. I sold one of my old domain names over Paypal.  The woman e-mailed me, we agreed on a price, she paid me, and then I used GoDaddy to turn the domain over to her (since I owned it through them).  Very easy.  However, it was a couple of years ago, and sites are always “upgrading”, so it may be harder now.

   Posted by Josh  on  12/13  at  08:53 AM  from  Georgia
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