.com Sold For Six Figures — Why PutLocker

This domain gets serious traffic.

[Editor’s note: this is the first post on Reglike by Sean Markey. Sean is a domain name expert with specific knowledge regarding SEO, and will be writing regarding SEO and domain names for the site.]

Sometimes a domain name sells and when you see it in the note you’re like…

THAT name sold…for HOW much?!

In such a case you can assume that either the site has a lot of traffic going to it still from whatever it used to be, or it has a bunch of links built to the site for the business that used to live on that domain.

The holy grail of acquiring domain names NOT since they’d make a good brand, but since the name has some inherent value due to the traffic it gets or the links pointing at the URL, is when a name has both.

The prior week, Andrew published his monthly review of sales at NameJet and SnapNames. A not-very-valuable domain (in and of itself) led the list at $102,499. That domain: PutLocker .com.

If you’re a domain investor scratching your head as to why a mediocre two-word brand sold for as much as a Mercedes-Benz X 167 GLS580…

It’s the traffic (and, to a slightly lesser extent, the SEO profile).

The site used to be a file-sharing site for movies that received around 1.6 million visitors per day, and in 2016 was among the 250 most visited sites on the internet. It has spawned countless putlocker mirror sites that are right now hoovering up organic and direct traffic:

• putlocker .mom (LOL) is getting regarding 915,000 visits/mo
• putlocker-is .org is doing regarding 630,000 per month.

Since of the popularity of the brand, and the ubiquity of .com (people just go there first), PutLocker .com is still doing some incredible numbers in direct/type-in traffic. As stated by Similarweb, it’s doing regarding 100,000 visits/mo.

And when you go and visit the site (don’t do it!) you get a chain of redirections and pop-up ads. It must pay well if someone put up a hundo-grand to redirect visitors to this ultra-spammy landing page:

So that’s why PutLocker was worth six-figures to someone: it’s the residual traffic (and, the SEO link profile, although it is not being used for that, right now).