Negotiating for Domain Names

Written by Chris Nielsen
January 31, 2007

Playing the Web Domain Game

> Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can
> get this guy to [sell me a domain]? I've even asked
> him to tell me a purchase price and got no response.
- Marsha Kopan, LED Digest 2336
- http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1730/55/

This is a much more common tale than most may realize. Organizations get hit with it all the time, and sometimes companies as well. Often one well-meaning web-savvy person will register a domain name for an organization, but in their own name. If something happens to that person the organization often cannot make any legal claim to the domain and cannot transfer, change, or renew it.

People that purchase expired domains generally do so because of the resale value of the domain, or the fact that they can "park" domains that have links and traffic, and make money from them. Since their investment is only about $12 a year on average, they only need to make about $.03 a day for the domain to pay for itself.

Since you know how much the person paid for the domain, you can offer them money to sell it to you, but the factors you have to consider are these...

How rich does your organization seem to be?

2) How valuable is the domain both in income and any potential sale to someone else. (Check dnjournal.com/domainsales.htm to see what some domain sales can command these days...!)

3) How greedy is the person that owns the domain.

You can try the direct approach and offer then something larger than you already mentioned. I would first confirm that your message did reach them. If it did and you didn't hear back I suspect it was much too low.

Or if you can wait, you can try the disinterested buyer approach. This is where you have someone like myself who is an Internet consultant contact the person and ask about the domain. The story being that the domain would be suitable for a client that has a new web site and needs a domain. The idea is to get a conversation going and be persistent about getting them to be more reasonable about letting the domain go.

Contacting them with ever-increasing offers may cause them to give in at some point. And it wouldn't hurt to see what other kind of domains they are interested in that could be offered as an incentive. For example, this kind of person might be very interested in the domain abuae.com which is a common misspelling of "abuse" or a business domain like buynetics.com, which could come with the other 5 main top level domains as a package. The purchase price for these domains may be much less than the cash price the seller is looking for.

If you really cannot deal with the person, the other thing you can use as an incentive is to let them know that your staff will be contacting search engines, directories, link partners, etc. to get as many of the existing links to your site changed to the new domain. This would be a big pain, but it will remove much of the value of the domain and can be done over a period of time. Issuing a press release could help this process as well, as well as other marketing options. Many local news stations like running these kinds of stories as well.

I have a few suggested rules for others to help avoid this problem:

1] Register the domain in the organization's name.

2] For the administrative contact, enter the name of the head of the organization or someone in a high position that should be around for a while, OR create a "role account", such as "Executive Director" and a role email address like ED@ yourdomain.org and this can be easily forwarded to the current ED.

* (The use of an email forward insures that should you lose all of the contacts listed, you can just change the email forward to get any confirmation and notification emails from the domain registrar.)

3] For the billing contact, use the above example and use a role for billing@ yourdomain.org and forward it to the person that pays the bills. This email needs to be different and forward to a different email address than the first one.

4] The technical contact should be the webmaster (1st choice) or hosting company support address.

5] It is recommended that you do not register your domain with the same company that hosts your web site and email. The reason is that if there is a conflict and your host is a jerk, they can shut down everything and hold it "hostage". By using another registrar you can easily set up a new hosting account and continue on. Of course, you will already have a backup of your web site, and list of all the email accounts to make this as easy as possible....!

Thank you,

Chris Nielsen
domainincubation.com