If you’ve ever thought about getting into the ‘domaining’ game, one thing you’ll eventually need is an accurate idea of the value of any domains you want to buy or sell. Even if you have no intention of buying or selling domain names, it’s illuminating to find out what (if anything) your domain names are worth.
There are a couple of free automated domain valuation services out there, and of course there are a number of paid services.
“The only truly accurate value is the price that a buyer is willing to pay”
Bear in mind that, as with real estate, the only truly accurate value is the price that a buyer is willing to pay. This may be much more or much less than you think it should be. These tools may help you get “within the ballpark” so you don’t end up over-spending or under-pricing. It’s useful to be able to give an independent valuation to a buyer or seller so that you start with the same assumptions.
SwiftAppraisal.com
SwiftAppraisal asks you a series of questions about your domain name – the number of words in the name, the size of the target market for the domain, the clarity of the name, the memorability of the name, and whether there are abbreviations or substitutions such as ’2′ for ‘to’ or ’4′ for ‘for’.
The results it provides are thus strongly influenced by your subjective opinions, but all the assumptions are listed in the final valuation. Some recognition of link popularity is given. The value is presented as a range, rather than a specific amount.
The site provides useful information about choosing domain names and about the evaluation process.
LeapFish.com
Leapfish is really easy to use – enter the domain name and it immediately returns a valuation. It scores the top level domain (‘.com’ scores 10), the ‘unwanted characters’ (eg hyphens and numerals), the length and then the domain’s visibility on the web, based on Archive.org, Google, Yahoo and MSN results.
The valuations may err on the conservative side, since no there is no recognition of the popularity of any keywords in the domain name.
NameBoy Appraisals
NameBoy offers a great free appraisal service. It’s different from the others in that it emails you the results, which takes a few minutes. The results are presented as a two-page document which you could easily email to a prospective buyer or seller. NameBoy bases its valuation more on the intrinsic qualities of the domain name, such as the popularity of the keywords on the major search engines.
They also use their own data, derived from the number of searches for the same keywords on their domain suggestion tool. It’s completely automatic, and you can enter a list of domain names. I don’t know if there’s a limit – I did 10 at a time. The valuations seem to be on the high side compared with the other services.
I have a couple of South African ‘.co.za’ domains. NameBoy didn’t cope with them at all – it stripped the ‘.za’ from the end and gave unrealistically low appraisals.
All three services have something useful to offer. Since they give different weight to factors like the number of incoming links, keyword popularity and so on, the best idea would be to use all three and take an average.
Some sites advertising paid appraisal services are:
GoDaddy.com – From $5.99
Sedo.com – From $29
Moniker.com – From $24.99
I haven’t tried any of these – it may be worth it once you’ve found a serious buyer or seller.
P.S. I almost made it through this entire post without mentioning Nemeas – statistical analysis software which scores your domain names against domain names which appear in the top Google results.
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Nice post. However, i want to inform you that the Nameboy link is broken somehow.
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