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Quality domain names are very valuable assets. How do you know how much your domain name is really worth? If you think that an appraisal is the answer, then think again!
Many companies offer appraisals for domain names as another way to make money. They don't offer a valuable service, but only another way to make you waste your money.
If you ask 10 different appraisals you will get 10 totally different figures unless they use the same software. They can't give you an accurate appraisal for the simple reason that they wouldn't have a clue.
For a quality domain name it's greatest value is not its current traffic revenue, but its brand value, or future brand and potential value.
An income producing domain name is typically purchased as an investment, and from an investor’s point of view the earning power is the critical element affecting the value of the domain name. An appraisal cannot be valid unless it takes into consideration the potential income of a properly developed domain name. It should also take into account the growth of the specific industry, because this can have a substantial effect on the profits generated in future years.
Nearly all the appraisals are based on the pay per click potential of a parked domain name, and this is the worst figure you can get. Parking your domain names is actually the worse option you can choose if you have quality generic domain names, and it's the lowest return on your investment.
Parking domain names is more suitable for low quality domains that are not good enough for a real business, or don't have the potential to be used for a real business. In this case, it's a waste of money to pay for an inaccurate appraisal. If you domain name is cheap and average or inferior, why do you really need an appraisal?
The simple concept of parked domain names is designed to make you invest your own money, and make you believe that because you are the owner of the domain names, you will get rich by collecting the biggest share of the advertising revenues. Nothing can be further from the truth. You will be very lucky if you get 10% of what the advertisers actually pay for a click. There are plenty of horrors stories of owners actually getting a lot less, and often nothing at all.
The reality is that developing your domain names is the best and most profitable idea. A properly developed site can easily generate hundreds or thousands of times more money than the same domain name parked. Everyone agrees that quality domain names are valuable Internet property. When you have valuable property, it makes sense to develop it, and this is where the real money is, the big money.
When you develop your domain name, the companies offering appraisals wouldn't have a clue how much money you can generate with your domain name and your real business. It's a joke to think that they will offer you an accurate appraisal for a few dollars.
At e21.com we do not get involved with appraisals and can't recommend any company that supply accurate ones. We prefer not to get involved with appraisals, and let the free competition and open market decide the true value of a domain name. We negotiate with buyers and sellers and it's up to them to make their own research, and never rely on appraisals, no matter where they come from.
Appraisals are mainly designed to make you part with your money, and we have yet to see one that reflects the true value of a quality domain name. A proper appraisal is only interesting for a good quality domain name. For a low quality inferior domain name, it's a pure waste of money and time, because the right appraisal will cost you more than the selling price of the domain name.
You should avoid automated domain name appraisals because they are worthless. No matter how good is the application that generates these automatic appraisals, no serious buyer or seller should rely on them. They have more entertainment value as a joke and a gimmick, than as a realistic value for a domain name.
The human appraisals are not better, because the appraisers are not qualified, and don't deliver the important required information.
Many companies claim that they are "experts" because they did a lot of appraisals. With worthless and useless appraisals, it makes no difference how many they produced, because 25,000 worthless appraisals only add up to a bigger pile of worthless information. It's like spam, even if you send out millions of them, at the end of the day, it's still junk, and it's still spam. More spam doesn't make it better, and more worthless appraisals don't improve the quality of these useless appraisals. Adding up negative values can only result in a negative figure.
All these worthless appraisals have a market for low quality worthless and useless domain names. It you need to pay $29 for an appraisal, and it will help you sell your worthless domain name for $100 then by all means, go ahead and order it. These appraisals can't be taken seriously for good and high quality domain names, because they are completely useless, and not worth the price of the paper they are printed on.
The fact is that the only way to properly appraise a quality domain name is by doing extensive research, and by analyzing a large amount of data. The appraiser can't do this work without the right qualifications, and expertise, and without spending a lot of time. Time is money, so it's easy to understand that all the low price valuations are totally worthless and useless.
A real appraiser, with the right credentials and proper experience to appraise quality domain names, should be able to charge between $200 to $300 per hour. To do a proper appraisal requires many days of work. Anything less serious is just a joke and a gimmick.
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