I’ve been dabbling in web sites for some time now and over the years I’ve had my fair share of projects that either never got started or started well but eventually withered and died[1]. Most of these projects had an associated domain name.
Previously, once I’ve decided that a project is moribund, I’ve just let the domain name lapse. But now I wonder if that’s the best approach. Maybe it would make sense to sell them. Some domain names can be worth quite a lot of money. Obviously I don’t think I’ve got anything as valuable as business.com but perhaps I can make a couple of quid selling these domains.
Currently I’m considering selling these:
- standup.co.uk – this is one of the first domains I registered. Many years ago I was running a UK standup comedy news site there. I even used it to blag press passes for the Edinburgh Fringe one year. But I ran out of ideas for it almost four years ago.
- wishlistwatch.com – this is far more recent. Last year I saw a good talk about Amazon Web Services and this was the site where I was going to experiment with the API. It was going to be a site where you’d register your wish list and you’d get notifications (email, RSS feeds – all that kind of stuff) if anything on your wish list went down in price. I still think it’s a good idea, but so does someone else and now I’ve lost all enthusiasm for implementing it.
So now I have a couple of problems. Firstly I have no idea how to value a domain name. And whilst there are plenty of people on the web who will do that for you, all of the decent ones (or, at least, the ones who look decent) charge for the service. And secondly I need to find somewhere to advertise and sell the domains. I’ve got no idea which of those (many, many) sites I can trust.
So while I ponder these issues I’ve just bunged Google Ads and a “this domain for sale” sign on them. Perhaps I’d be better off parking them with Sedo or someone like that.
This is all new ground to me and I’d be grateful for any advice from anyone who has done this before.
[1] I’ve had successful projects too. Don’t want to make it sound like everything I do is doomed to failure. It’s just that successful projects aren’t the subject of this post.