A Football Analogy: Resetting Domain Name Expectations

How does the past affect your domain decisions?

Last Saturday was a dismal day down here in Austin. The Texas Longhorns football team lost to Texas Tech in an amazing finish. If they won, the Longhorns would have toppled four top 11 teams in a row and been set up for a national title game. Instead, with just 8 seconds left in the game, Texas dropped an easy interception that would have sealed the game. Texas Tech scored on the next play to win the game. So now the Longhorns are 8-1 for the year and ranked 4th in the Bowl Championship Series.

Most people I talked to ahead of the season began predicted Texas would lose three games this year: Oklahoma, Missouri, and either Oklahoma State or Texas Tech. So if you would have asked any of these people ahead of the beginning of the season if they’d be willing to take an 8-1 start and #4 in the BCS, they would have jumped on it. But then expectations changed as Texas rolled through the schedule. No one is completely satisfied now, even if they would have been satisfied with this result ahead of the season began.

I run into this from time to time with domain names. I’ll talk to someone who had an offer of $15,000 for a domain when times were flush. Now they hesitate to sell it for less than that, even though they doubt they’ll get a $15,000 offer again any time soon. And they need the cash now. It pains them to sell the domain name.

Or sometimes someone refuses to sell a domain name for less than what they paid for it, even though they know the value of that particular domain has decreased since they bought it…or that they over paid for it in the heat of an auction.

Consider the reverse, too. You know someone just bought a domain for $10,000 at auction, so you refuse to pay them $15,000, even though you would have offered $20,000 for the domain had you not known what they paid for it.

It’s hard to do, but when contemplating domain sales and purchases you ought to consider the future, not the past.