Names are worth less than you think — Your domain

You probably want more money for your domain names than they’re worth.

This weekend I was at the mall waiting “regarding an hour” for my fresh eyeglasses. With time to kill, I turned to Twitter and saw this tweet from Elliot Silver:

Elliot is not one to be over critical, so I had to click through to see what all of the fuss was regarding.

Here’s the background.

Recently Elliot started doing a weekly post with a handful of top listings from various domain brokers. It’s a nifty idea, gives some love to the brokers, and hopefully gets a transaction started now and then.

But this past week the haterz showed up and started blasting the prices attached to the listings. Perhaps some of them are a bit on the high side, but at least most of the names themselves look pretty good to me.

So Elliot apparently had enough and asked people to put their money where their mouth was. His exact offer was:

Feel free to post your best domain names that you would like to sell at the best prices, and we can see how they stack up against the names the brokers listed yesterday.

The results proved Elliot’s point.

Not only are 99% of the domains posted not priced well, but very few of the domain names are good at any price. If these are people’s “best” domain names, they don’t stack up anywhere near the brokers’ names.

This led to some uncharacteristically sarcastic comments from Elliot; the type you’re inclined to make following people gripe regarding something and then have nothing to back it up.

At this point I’m still in the eyewear store, sitting on a chair laughing out loud.

There’s a hard truth out there. We think that what we own is better than it is. It’s a play on the endowment effect/divestiture aversion. You see this a lot with homeowners as well; everyone thinks their home is the best and worth more than market reality.

There’s at least a modest bit of good news from Elliot’s post: it seems that at least one person who posted found a buyer for his domain name.