Research helps me decide whether to acquire a domain — End user

Kassey Lee explains the process he went through when evaluating an expired domain for purchase.

I was watching Godaddy Auctions today and found the expiring domain YogaYoung.com. Since “yoga” is a popular keyword, I decided to look into this domain.

First, I checked LinkedIn but found no firm using the name “Yoga Young”. Google search gave no hope either.

Still, dotDB, a site that shows registered domains containing a word/second level domain, noted 12 matches. dotDB has a nice feature I like — the matches have links. By installing the Snap Links extension to my Firefox browser, I can open the links and check their websites all at once.

The result was the discovery of two operating websites: YogaYoungistan.com and YogaYoung.cn.

Since YogaYoungistan.com by now matches its brand Yoga Youngistan, there is no motivation for the firm to change its domain to YogaYoung.com which is not brand-matching following all.

Nevertheless, YogaYoung.cn looked promising at first since Chinese firms like to upgrade from .cn to .com.

The home page design paints a solid firm and the photos show a professional team and active yoga classes. Still, even if you don’t read Chinese, you can see the name “Maya Yoga” prominently displayed at a number of locations. Thus, we can conclude that Maya Yoga is their brand and therefore upgrade from YogaYoung.cn to YogaYoung.com is unlikely since they are not brand-matching.

Based on this research, I decided not to acquire YogaYoung.com since I could not find any potential end users for it.