Independent Domain Name Advice

Independent domain name advice is a commercial assessment of a domain or a portfolio: what it might realistically be worth, whether it should be sold, developed, held or allowed to lapse, and what a sensible price would be for a name someone wants to acquire. Ferguson Media Group provides that assessment based on the market rather than on automated appraisal figures, and gives the unwelcome answer where that is the accurate one.

The questions people actually arrive with

Almost every enquiry reduces to one of these. They are worth listing because seeing the question stated plainly is often half the answer.

• Should I sell this domain, or is it worth more later?
• Should I develop it instead of selling it?
• What might it realistically be worth?
• Someone has offered me a figure — is it sensible?
• Which domain should my company acquire?
• The asking price on a domain I want seems high. Is it?
• Which extension makes sense for what I am doing?
• I have sixty domains and renew them all every year. Which ones should I keep?
• Could this domain support a viable business?

Several of these are answered at length in Insights, which is the better starting point if you would rather read than ask.

How an assessment is done

The method is the same one we use for acquisitions on our own account, which is the only reasonable basis for advising anyone else.

It starts with the market rather than the name. What industry does this term belong to, is money spent there, and who spends it? Then the buyer universe: which organisations could plausibly want this name, how many of them exist, and are any of them currently trading under something weaker? Then the name itself — length, clarity, spelling, extension, and whether a company could credibly operate under it. Then the evidence: comparable sales in public records, what similar names are currently listed at, and the considerable gap that usually exists between the two.

Finally, the alternative. If the domain is not a straightforward sale, could something useful be built on it? A name with a development route has options that a name without one does not.

Portfolio review

A portfolio that has accumulated over years is rarely the portfolio its owner would assemble today. Names were bought for reasons that made sense at the time, categories moved on, and the renewal invoice arrives for all of them equally.

A review sorts a portfolio into the names worth holding, the names worth actively marketing, the names that would be better developed, and the names that should be allowed to expire. The last category is usually the largest and is almost always the most valuable conclusion — every renewal not paid on a hopeless name is money available for a better one.

On automated valuations

Automated appraisal tools produce a number instantly, which is precisely the problem: the number arrives with no reasoning attached, and a figure without reasoning cannot be argued with or learned from.

These tools work from what they can measure — length, extension, keyword data, patterns in past sales — and they cannot measure the things that actually determine a price. They do not know whether three companies in the category are currently rebranding. They do not know that a term has a second meaning that makes it unusable. They cannot tell a name a business would proudly trade under from one it would quietly avoid.

They are useful as a rough sanity check and as one input among several. They are not a valuation, and an asking price set from one is the most common reason a domain sits unsold for years.