The highest sale for the week was for the domain name titled rock.com.au, which was secured by its new owner on the 12^th of April for $3,679.45. There are an endless amount of related keywords that accompany this name when performing a standard Google search – in fact, around 1.77B search results are found for things such as: music, celebrity profiles, products, services, sayings and the like. When assessing the number of searches that are performed by an Australian Google audience, approximately 6,600 searches are conducted for the direct term ‘’rock’’ – a considerable amount, and a number that should bring in notable visitors.

Combined, these factors demonstrate the domain name has considerable appeal to a wide variety of target audiences, meaning there is a great deal of liquidity in the name and that it will serve incredibly well as an investment for the owner. Should the owner decide to auction this domain in the future, we’d be surprised if it isn’t worth a whole lot more the next time it is up for grabs!

Our other notable sale for the week was for voi.com.au, selling for the bargain price of $1149.45 on the 14^th of April. Another of our highly sought after three letter domain names, the new owner is Perth-based company ‘Voi Organics’ – an online retailer selling a range of organic health and skincare products including face, body and baby care concentrates.

With the business currently using a longer domain name, voiorganics.com.au, the owner now has the added flexibility of choosing a primary domain name and redirecting traffic from the other one. Furthermore, this shorter domain name will certainly help the business with its SEO as it is likely to capture additional web traffic through Google searches for the acronym “voi” – a term that is searched for 660 times per month by Australians. This direct match will also allow the business to improve the results of its marketing efforts, with a shorter name more recognisable and easier to remember amongst its target audience.

In news from abroad, the two highest sales of the week went to cak.com and L40.com. The former of the two domains, cak.com, went for a reported figure of US$38,800 – few details were immediately available, however, a Google search for the term indicates it may have once been assigned for use by the Cardiology Associates of Kentucky. Meanwhile, the latter of the two domains, L40.com, was sold for a sum of US$30,500. Some observers remained sceptical of the transaction however, particularly since the most relatable keyword for the term ‘’L40’’ refers to an obsolete phone manufactured by LG.

That’s it for this week, stay tuned for the latest updates in our next post.

IP Neighbourhood is a professional research suite containing 18 new tools to assist buyers and sellers alike.

This week at Netfleet, we have identified our favourite 6 tools within the IP Neighbourhood suite and present some of the key benefits to your business.

1. Domain Due Diligence

• To validate statistics provided by the seller when you are looking to purchase a domain or website
• Multiple trust metrics help you determine link quality to safely assess how the domain or website was previously used thereby eliminating issues eminating from artificial or farmed backlinks
• For sellers, the tool offers extensive stats on page rank and organic pages listed in search engines. As higher ranking sites may require less ongoing SEO investment, the domain or website may command a higher selling price. This information can also be made transparent to your client

2.  Auction Intelligence

• Shows full purchase and transfer information combined with a full whois history at various time intervals
• View historical whois records including Registration, Admin and Technical contacts
• Shows multiple search functions and shows trends in domain name acquisitions

3. Domain Name Management

• Saves you time by allowing you to manage all of your domain names and websites in one place
• Gives you total visability of your portfolio

  4. Aftermarkets & Auctions

•   Integration with multiple marketplaces and auction websites
•   Sophisticated SEARCH function and visibility of advance metrics all on one screen

5. Expired Domains

• 60,000 + new expired domain names added daily *
• Allows you to quickly identify domains in your chosen market

6. New Domains

• Identify trends, discover emerging markets and track competitors in .com, .net and .org as the tool monitors new Domain Name registrations
• Allows you to perform defensive Domain Name registrations

* Note that the tools work for Next week, we will unveil another 6 tools within the IP Neighbourhood suite to enhance your domaining experience.

In the meantime, if you’d like to know more go to the website.

As per previous email communication to all clients earlier today, there was a security breach of our database at Netfleet.

Since learning of the intrusion, we took Netfleet.com.au offline and have been taking steps to address the vulnerability that led to this incident. We have been cooperating with the AFP and Cert Australia conducting an exhaustive investigation in this matter.

We have since found the source of the vulnerability in the 3rd party software used, and applied a permanent fix.

Furthermore, we have taken additional security measures beyond this intrusion. We have rebuilt the server from the ground up, ensuring that no malicious data or files are present on our new server, and we have reset all client passwords on Netfleet.com.au.

We are still, and will continue to, work with the relevant authorities investigating this breach.

Again, we would like to stress that we are erring on the side of caution and, there is no need to be unduly alarmed as it is in fact only a very remote possibility that your details have been accessed. Furthermore, if you have any questions or concerns whatsoever, do not hesitate to get in touch

Best wishes,
The Netfleet Team

1)      .com domains command the highest prices so therefore are where the money is.

Whilst this is true, and will no doubt continue to be so, from an investment point of view this isn’t relevant.  Successful investors look for growth opportunities, not solely for high values – no one would claim that investing in platinum over the last few years just has to be better than investing in oil because pound for pound it’s so much more expensive – the same is true of segments of the domain market

2)      All the really successful domainers seem to have made their millions in .com domains so that’s what I want to do

Again true, the guys in the industry who have really made it big, tend to have done so through .com investment.  But the key thing is most of them started over 10 years ago.  .com domain values did appreciate hugely between 2000 and 2007 and many people made a lot of money.  However that ship has sailed.  .com values have plateaued or even fallen since then whilst other name spaces have taken over the growth reigns.

3)      .com domains have a 6 billion person audience whilst ccTLDs are limited

The size of a market does not necessarily impact values or growth.  Whilst a bigger market will normally mean more liquidity, values in domains are driven by supply and demand.  If that balance of supply and demand doesn’t change, nor can you expect domain value too.  This is the same argument for saying one should invest in rice simply because it has a larger market than gold for example.

4)      Most domainers invest in .com – surely this says something about the namespace

Unfortunately just because everybody else is doing it, doesn’t mean it’s the best idea.  On the contrary, your competition is that much harder as to make a profit trading you basically have to beat the experts at their own game if you want to sell back into the domainer market.  Unfortunately the ‘com is king’ sheep mentality is kept alive by the many people who are heavily invested in the area and need to talk it up at all costs.

5)      .com domains rank the best in search engine results pages

Actually the opposite is true… in most countries a Google search will be dominated by results using domains in their respective ccTLD – .com domains often don’t get a look in.  Google’s goal is to return relevant results so it makes sense for them to return a .fr result for searchers in France, a co.uk result for the UK etc etc.  The exception (and also why this myth is perpetuated) is in the U.S where for various reasons the local ccTLD (.us) has not taken off – therefore .com is considered the default ccTLD and does indeed dominate results.

The facts are that .com values have fallen since about 2007-2008.  DnJournal, Sedo all concur.  We’ve had LLLL.com buyouts leading to a bubble which has since burst.  Clearance rates have bombed at auctions.  The vast majority of domainers who have started in domaining in the last few years by investing in .com domains have disappeared.

The main problem being there are less and less end users buying .com domains and new domainer entrants cannot prop up the .com market indefinitely.  If you think about it, the vast majority of businesses, looking for a website will be locally based.  They trade exclusively within their own country and have no interest in expanding on a global scale (I’m talking about the backbone of our economies here – the builders, carpet cleaners, cafes etc).  What happens when they decide it’s time to get a website together – if (and they may well not) they consider .com they will struggle to find anything remotely acceptable to hand register and a quick look on the aftermarket will be met with sky-high prices.  But if they look at their local ccTLD there will be many times the amount of available domains to register and purchasing a premium domain is a fraction of the cost of the equivalent .com.  So it’s an obvious choice.  As more and more of these end-users (which outnumber domainers 10,000 to 1) put their money into ccTLDs, .com will struggle to keep momentum even with the steady general growth of the internet.

Ok, so it’s a little short of Facebook users, and a touch under the number of Twitter accounts, but nonetheless, it is still the largest Australian domain name aftermarket on the planet

I’d like to thanks all of our clients who have helped grow the .au market over the last 2 and a half years, without which we would be nowhere, and of course, here’s to our next 10,000!

Thanks
Mark

As you will see there is a great list of domain names up for auction right now. Please be quick though as these domains will sell to the highest bidder at the end of the auction.

This is a great opportunity for a swift and speedy transaction open exclusively to Netfleet members.

Dont forget, this auction closes at 3pm EST on the 12th October so bid now to avoid missing out:

http://www.netfleet.com.au/index.php?a=auctions

Happy bidding!

The Netfleet Team

Hurry, Places Are Limited!

We will be running our Domain Aftermarket Auctions every single week, each running for 7 days, from Tuesday to Tuesday. In order to maximise sales for each and every auction, we have decided to limit the number of domains in each auction, therefore concentrating bidding energy in to just a few select domains each week. This nurtures a high level of activity for every single auction, ensuring that quality is not diluted between domains, and your domain is not lost in the crowd.

How to Submit Your Domains

Submitting your domains is a two minute process. Once logged in to the Members Area, click Add Domains to start the step by step wizard. Follow the prompts, and from there you can choose your domain name, preferred auction date and reserve pricing. Then, sit back and relax and watch the bids roll in!

Want to know more?

For a detailed breakdown on our new sales platform, please read the Domain Aftermarket Auctions User Guide on Netfleet. Equally, do not hesitate to Contact Us should you require further information.

All the best,

The Netfleet Team

.co.uk was dominant but it seemed not nearly as so as the .au is in Australia. So I conducted a rigorous scientific experiment….

I counted the number of .uk’s compare to the number of non-.uk domain names I saw written on vehicles, shops and signs while I was driving around suburban Manchester. Note: I excluded non-UK vehicles from the survey.

After about an hour (miraculously avoiding any accidents!), I had the following results:

21 co.uks
17 non co.uks (almost all were .com)

So co.uk is preferred 55% of the time.

On my return, I perfumed the same experiment in Australia.

26 com.au’s (no net.au’s surprisingly)
2 non com.aus (all coms)

That equates to a 93% preference for com.au.

So what does this mean? It clearly shows that Australians are very much more loyal to .au that the Brits are to .uk. But I think it says something about relative valuations too. The following might be considered as drawing a long bow but bear with me

It’s generally accepted that co.uk domains are very much more valuable that their equivalent com.au domains (with the usual geographic and cultural exceptions). Hard to say how much but let’s put a figure on it for the sake of the argument. Let’s say co.uk are worth five times the com.au. For example:

– If HousePrices.com.au is worth $20K, HousePrices.co.uk would be worth $100K
– Jobs.com.au is worth $400K, Jobs.co.uk is worth $2M
– BuyLaptopsOnline.com.au is worth $500, BuyLaptopsOnline.co.uk is worth $2,500

Sounds reasonable?

Now the underlying driver behind valuations is supply & demand. There’s obviously a higher demand for co.uk’s in the UK due to a much higher population and that’s why co.uk domains are worth more after all but are they really worth five times more? Or, putting it another way, are com.au domains undervalued?

OK back to my robust & comprehensive study…

Population of the UK is 61M but only 55% of the population uses co.uk, that means the effective market is only 34M. For Australia, the market is 93% of 21M or 20M.

So, here’s the question – should co.uk values really be worth 5 x that of com.au values when the demand/market is only 1.7 x the size? Are .co.uk domains over valued or com.au domains undervalued.

The other thing to consider is the number of domains registered. There are 1.5M com.au domains servicing a market of 20 compared with 8M co.uk domains servicing a market of 34M. Does this mean for Australia to ‘catch up’ to UK values, there needs to be around 6M com.au domains registered? If that happens, .au domain values will surely skyrocket.

Disclaimer: Some huge assumptions and estimations and small sample sizes could render the above arguments almost worthless. However comparing markets like this is often good food for thought so please add your feedback below!

There’s currently lots to talk about in the Australian domain industry.  With trading of .au domain names being relatively new, it’s meant we’ve seen lots of changes over just a short period.  Emergence of an aftermarket, competitive expired domain auctions, backorder services and plenty of small, medium and blockbuster sales which have helped to set the scene for domain names in Australia.   There’s going to be plenty to write about!

We’ll also be encouraging guest blogs to so if you have something you want to get off your chest or an announcement to make, let us know….

Due to the success of our first Domain Aftermarket Auction on Netfleet, we are happy to announce its return in the form of a TECHNOLOGY SPECIAL, which is now open for your bids. The quality of these domain names is first class. Just skimming down the list shows a plethora of one word generic domain names that are at the absolute top of their food chain. Getting to the top of Google or Yahoo using the power of these domains goes without saying. Deciding on which domain, or domains you want, will be the hard part.

These domain names will only be for sale in our auction for 7 days. Do not miss out on the opportunity to buy a domain name that can build a business and visit the Domain Aftermarket Auction today. Without further ado, lets see which technology related domain names are going under the hammer:

We appreciate you do not have every hour of the day to increase your bid price should you be beaten by a higher bid, so have incorporated maximum bidding, or proxy bidding in to the platform. This means every bid you enter should be your maximum, and the system will automatically bid on your behalf, only ever $1 higher than the previous bid. For example, if you enter a bid of $200 for a domain, and another users subsequently bids $150, the system will automatically bid you up to $151, meaning you would still be winning the auction.

Bidding is underway right now, closing at Fri, 27th Aug 2010 15:00:00 AEST, so to secure your chance of acquiring one of these premium .au domain names, check out our Domain Aftermarket Auctions right now:

http://www.netfleet.com.au/index.php?a=auctions

Good luck!

The Netfleet Team ]]>