1. Offer received
2. You can accept it, reject it or provide a Minimum Acceptable Offer Price
3. The prospective buyer can accept it, reject it or provide a Counter Offer
4. You can accept it, or reject it

So when you get an email that says:

The buyer has responded to your Minimum Acceptable Offer Price with a counter offer.

…you can’t counter their counter offer like in normal negotiations. So when you make a your Minimum Acceptable Offer Price you have to get it right.

This week someone made an offer of $100 for a domain I feel is worth $800. I responded with $1250 thinking that perhaps at the end of negotiations I could get $800. They countered with $550. Suddenly I was left with only two options – accept $550 or end negotiations. Oopsy!

In this type of negotiation I think you need to be more bold than usual. Either make your Minimum Acceptable Offer Price higher than you normal starting price, to let them know you mean business, or set it at precisely the price you want for it. The former should force them to make their best counter offer, while the latter has a better chance of being accepted.

I took the $550 -the domain cost me $10 and all the other TLDs were available.

Over the years Metnick had issued just a few email addresses at Chicago.com to employees, friends or people who assisted in the site’s development. Out of the blue one day last summer, a man called Metnick and offered him $500 for an email address that would be his first name @Chicago.com. As it happens that name was one of the few Metnick had already handed out. Metnick asked the guy who had the address if he wanted to split the $500 and sell it. He said no. Metnick relayed the news to the person who inquired and he upped his offer to $1,000. But again – the guy with the address said no!

That might have been that – but it got Metnick thinking about the importance of email addresses in today’s world. He realized he would never sell his own address at Chicago.com, one he has used as his universal email identity for nine years now. So he started actively marketing Chicago.com email addresses, initially offering new customers the use of one for $299 a year. To his amazement a local real estate company ordered eight email addresses at $299 each – giving him just under $2,400 in his first order.

As this was uncharted territory, Metnick decided to let the market determine what his rates should be. He added multiple-year options to his $299 annual base rate, offering three years for $749, five years for $1,049 or ten years for $1,949. He was shocked when one customer ordered five addresses for 10-year periods – an order worth close to $10,000!

Metnick said he raised the prices four more times before landing at $4,000 for five years. A local business woman took her first name at Chicago.com for that price. A male businessman did the same, then a local entertainment company bit at that price. Metnick knew he was on to something and needed to build an automated system and start treating email addresses as identity assets like domain names are.

Obviously to get that sort of money you need your domain to be the name of a major city. But a lesser city will still be worth something. And, as long as it is a quality site – you can still run content on the domain itself.

Metnick is setting up a service that makes selling email addresses easy. It should be generally available once his initial list of 200 generic dotcoms has it up and running.

I actually did this with a domain a dozen years ago, for revenue share (ads in the online email account). That particular operator didn’t last long, and I was left with people who couldn’t access their email. Even if the vendor is more dependable, it does mean you are committed to keeping the domain, or being 100% certain a new owner won’t leave your customers high and dry.

It looks like the Irish Times have made a costly mistake – they’ve been giving away @ireland.com email accounts:
https://mail.ireland.com/zimbra/public/itimes.jsp

The record price probably goes to Elite750 – with just 750 email addresses available, it costs $7500 plus $750 per month – yikes!
http://www.ubergizmo.com/2011/07/elite750-premium-email-address/

EmailMe are offering numerous country level email addresses for $500/yr. They are pseudo country domains like uk.net. They sensibly use Google Mail as the underlying service. That’s something you can easily set up for your domain.

Pacific Octane chief executive James Wester sold the domain to Pixel Capital founding director Roland Bleyer, who operates financial products aggregators creditcard.com.au and creditworld.com.au, under the Credit Card Network brand.

Bleyer purchased the creditcard.net domain for $138,000 in September, and at the time, told SmartCompany the company was looking at moving into the American market.

This .net.au sale was made around the same time, but was not disclosed.

James Wester said this morning the sale is only the beginning, as domains will continue to rise in price.

“They’re going to keep rising. Just as 20 or 30 years ago, when every Australian had to open up the Yellow Pages to find what they were looking for, the Yellow Pages made a lot of money and kept raising the price.”

So is it a good investment? Yes, if it is going to be used for a website. These are my three golden rules for domain purchases:

1) .com is king. Virtually any domain name that consists of a regular word or three will gain value over time.

2) Exact match keyword domains should be .com unless you are willing to put a lot of SEO work in. There are dozens of extensions that can compete with you, but if you have the .com it will have more resale value, and more type-in traffic.

3) Other extensions are OK if you are going to create a genuine website (not something that relies purely on SEO tricks or paid traffic). But it needs to sound appropriate. James.me is OK for a personal blog, but James.org sounds wrong.

And here’s GoDaddy’s $240K print ad in USA Today:

Lame! It’s not like it is a reply ad in which they mock their competitor. It’s just a cheap copy.

When a company is so poorly run, you have to question how they treat things like security. And big registrars can fail through negligence – RegisterFly is a great example.

In part this will be due to GoDaddy agreeing with the Stop Online Piracy Act, while companies more in tune with their client base like NameCheap are opposing the Act.

I suggest that GoDaddy sticks to having ads with pretty girls and that’s it. No blog posts, no mentioning their stance on topics. Because, like the elephant hunting fiasco, they have no concept of what they should and shouldn’t say.

80,000 XXX domains were sold in presale and many companies like Pepsi and Nike lined up to purchase adult domains. The University of Kansas reportedly just paid $3,000 for a variety of XXX URLs.

GoDaddy sells them at $99/year. So that’s 8 million dollars already. Porn businesses have already indicated that they will not be using XXX because they don’t want their sites to be filtered out of browsers and search services.

So ultimately all that has happened is pseudo-extortion. It’s the same as a street prostitute asking for $99 to not stand outside a shopfront.

The only plus I can foresee is that those who bought generic porn XXX domains might use them to be legitimate gateways to the dark side of the web. Yeah right!

More at Mashable.

Closing Auctions is a list of domain names being auctioned at Bido, GoDaddy, Flippa, CAX and Sedo, showing those with just a few minutes left, so you can snipe a bargain. It only shows domains that have an existing bid, so at least someone has decided it is worth buying.

While other factors should be considered before making an investment, the tool displays:

• Estibot value (via Valuate.com)
• Searches and Frequency – use these as a rough guide only
• CPC – how much bids cost in Adwords

I recommend setting the filter so that only those valued above $250 are listed.

And really, you should find domains you want by other means, and set an alarm to bid at the last minute. Purely using this tool means you might panic-purchase without fully investigating the domain.

• ICANN tried telling Verisign not to monetize unregistered domains, back in 2003
• Verisign wasn’t happy, so they sued ICANN
• ICANN couldn’t afford to fight, because they are a non-profit org
• A deal was made whereas Verisign will keep their control over .com forever, and will be allowed to increase prices

It costs almost nothing for Verisign to maintain the .com registry, yet they keep raising prices. It can be argued that customers can choose a different domain extension, but the reality is .com is and always will be the #1 TLD in the mind of the public.

That is why you domain costs are going up, yet again.

• if the name makes sense, it can be valuable
• if a few .me sites become well-known, the rest will have legitimacy

Three years ago Rick Schwartz, Michael Berkens and Ammar Kubba pooled their resources to invest in a handful of high quality one-word .me domains, including Meet.me – a name they paid $5,890 for. They just sold it for the astounding sum of $450,000

 On June 24th, 2011, The Wall Street Journal reported that private-equity firms KKR and Silver Lake Partners, as well as a third investor, were near to closing a deal to buy GoDaddy.com, which has 45 million domain names under management.  

On July 1,2011 Go Daddy confirmed that KKR and Silver Lake Partners and Technology Crossover Ventures closed the deal. Although the purchase price was never officially announced it was widely reported to be somewhere around $2.25 billion.

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Web.com purchased Network Solutions for $405 million + 18 million shares. It was previously owned by an equity firm, so not much has changed.