These domain auctions are heating up for non-traditional reasons

How much would you pay for these domains if you didn’t know the backstory?

 

Picture of clock with words "expired domains"

Looking ahead at the next 5-10 days, there are some domains of non-traditional value headed to your favorite expired domain auction platform.

To help you get ahead of the “WHY are people actually paying money for this name?!?” of it all, I’ll look at a few of the names, and talk about why they may fetch some head-scratchingly-high prices.

Best-MineCraft-Servers .org

If you’ve been a domain investor for longer than a week, you can probably see that this is a problematic URL. “Minecraft” is a game owned by Microsoft, and using someone else’s brand in your URL is typically a bad idea.

Though the domains in this site’s backlink profile are on the spammy side, there are a lot of them, and they lend the domain some authority for use in SEO (if one knows what they are doing).

Finally, according to Catched.com, this domain earns $22 in parking revenue (not sure what unit of time that is tied to, though), so if a few people are building a portfolio of revenue-generating domains, this auction could get a little heated despite the trademark issue.

GreatGreenWall .org

This was a site dedicated to an African ecological initiative. From National Geographic:

The “Great Green Wall” is an initiative to increase the amount of arable land in the Sahel, the region bordering Africa’s Sahara Desert. Eleven nations are investing in projects as varied as agroforestry to sustainable development.

This domain has a very powerful backlink profile in a very profitable niche. With links from hugely authoritative sites like NY Times, The Guardian, BBC, BusinessInsider, Wired, Slate, Salon, TreeHugger.com, Mother Jones, Atlas Obscura, MorningStar.com and 2100 more, this is an extremely valuable domain in the hands of an experienced SEO. Price is over 5-figures with just a couple days left.

BearShare .com

This, like GreatGreenWall .org, is valuable because there used to be a popular or well-linked-to site built on the domain.

Wikipedia helps us out with the context, here:

BearShare was a peer-to-peer-file-sharing-application originally created by Free Peers, Inc. for Microsoft Windows and also a rebranded version of iMesh by MusicLab, LLC, tightly integrated with their music subscription service.

A valuable backlink profile, but not as valuable as GreatGreenWall–which is reflected in the price (half of what GGW is at ). It will still go for a surprising amount of money given the mediocre, but fantastically rhyming, two-word brand.

ApolloMunichInsurance .com

What’s this domain worth, on it’s own… $8?

Not even that, maybe.

But it’s got a bid of near-mid-four figures.

Here’s what the site used to be, from CoverFox:

Apollo Munich Health Insurance, founded on 8th August 2007 as a joint venture between Apollo Hospitals Group and Munich Health, has become HDFC ERGO Health Insurance. January 2020 saw the completion of the acquisition process of 51.25 percent shares of Apollo Munich Health Insurance. Apollo Munich Health Insurance was responsible for bringing a host of changes in health insurance products. It offered simplified products and hassle-free claim settlement to its customers.

If you look into domains like this long enough, you’ll see that a lot of really valuable names (from an SEO point of view) were acquired at some point and redirected, and then forgotten about (or the main acquiring brand goes out of business). The prices of these auctions–at least up until the last bidding war–are usually priced well to the value. This is the least valuable of the group (excluding the parking-revenue domain at the beginning of this article), and the price reflects that.

Still valuable! But relative to the other two, less so.

Here are a few more names coming to auction with big SEO value:

  • TheMastOnline .com
  • InfinitePower .org
  • DIYToolKit .org

 

Post link: These domain auctions are heating up for non-traditional reasons

© DomainNameWire.com 2022. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact editor (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

Back to top button