The first question: Was $50,000 a reasonable price for table.com?  

Since domain names are unique, there wasn't going to be an exact calculation which could tell us the answer, but there were several strategies I decided to pursue to help us make an evaluation:

• Creating a list of comparable domains which were recently sold.  If I could identify the most similar recent sales, I would probably have a pretty reasonable number.  But, could I collect enough data about premium domain sales?  Would their be enough very similar single word generic names from which to draw conclusions?
• Availing myself of some of the many valuation services out there.  While "the experts" tend to be skeptical of these evaluation services, it seemed like a worthwhile exercise, both to better understand the factors that go into their ratings, and to generate a range of data.  And, I'm curious...  How accurate are these evaluations?
• Asking some of "the experts": I was going to ask absolutely everybody their opinion.

I'll delve into the details of each of these in a separate posting. 

But, while you're here...  What do you think is an appropriate price for table.com?  Enter our contest!

Domains are each unique and special (or not special) in their own way, so there is little in the way of generic pricing advice.  One interesting tidbit comes from domain listing service Alpha Names (which also provides appraisals and commission-based brokerage services), which offers this concise summary of value ranges for various domains as part of their sales procedure.

If you've ever bought or sold a house, you (or your real estate agent) probably put together a list of comparable houses which sold recently in the same neighborhood, as a way of helping you understand typical pricing in your local market.  This information (combined with your knowledge about the difference between your house and your neighbors') allows you to set an appropriate price.

Similarly, I hoped to find enough similar recent domain sales to get at least a ballpark estimate of the premium domain market.  In this case "in the same neighborhood" (which is key, because I don't care about the price people are getting for xgadfga3.tv) meant short english word names... which I was hoping sold for more.

It took me awhile to find such a list (long enough that I began to gather the data by hand).  The online auction sites don't seem to like to share their own sale prices, but Domain Name Journal lists the biggest sales of the year.  This was very helpful. 

Our domain didn't seem as marketable as they year's top seller porn.com ($9 million) or seniors.com ($1.8 million) but it did seem very comparable to clock.com ($175,000, Moniker, 7/3/07), pottery.com ($150,000, Sedo, 7/3/07), fountain.com ($95,000, Moniker, 7/3/07), and cushion.com ($75,000, Private, 7/10/07).  All are singular, generic, single word English nouns.

Bingo.org!

Several other lists I found useful for comparison, were Zetetic's list of all-time top domain sales (for some very high numbers), as well as two searchable databases of domain sale data, DNSalePrice.com and NameBio.com.  I found NameBio.com a little more helpful, but apparently, DNSalePrice.com contains more information about private sales, so consider checking both. 

I wanted to try out some of the valuation services I'd seen online.  Some of these are completely automated, like Leapfish or SwiftAppraisal.com. Other firms, like GoDaddy.com and Sedo.com, have a team of valuation experts who make a (more educated?) guess.  In this post, I'll talk about the automated valuation services, and their results.

Leapfish

Leapfish's automated system asks you a series of multiple choice questions.  At the end, you get a domain valuation estimate.  Some of the choices were hard for me (Was table.com's marketability "good" or "great"?), but relatively conservative and plausible answers implied a valuation of $36,783.00.

SwiftAppraisal

SwiftAppraisal.com's more automated system gave the following assessment:

Domain: table.com
Marketability: very good
Clarity: very good
Memorability: very good
Link popularity: 47%
Extension: excellent
Word Count: excellent
Hyphens: not present
Numerals: not present
Substitutions: not present
Abbreviations: not present

Estimated value: $92,000 - $140,000.

Part of the process of interpreting comparables is understanding how relevant they are.  Changes in the domain market will affect how much faith we can put in similar sales.  If the market has become less good, we may be less likely to get a formerly reasonable amount.  If the market has become more frothy, our outlook may have improved.

On its website, Leapfish.com writes about about how big domain sales are less frequent than they once were.  "During the good old days of the Internet boom 'rags to riches' type stories of cheap domain names resold for hundreds of thousands of dollars [were] possible.  However, things have slowed down considerably since then and it is very rare to hear of a domain name sold for more than $10,000."

Of course, the infrastructure for buying and selling domains (online auctions like Sedo.com, real-world auctions like Moniker, certified offer services from domain registrars) and the ability to monetize purchased domains (Google ads, for instance), are clearly much improved from the boom.  There are newsletters and conferences for domain arbitrageurs. 

Domain Name Journal's Ron Jackson says "...As this industry continues to grow at an exponential rate, competition is heating up in every sector including registration and parking services, aftermarket platforms, media outlets, trade shows, and everything in between."

Domains Magazine says "the market for generic domain names is booming."  Research and appraisal services firm Zetetic reports that the domain name aftermarket broke the $100 million mark in 2006.  Domain broker Sedo claims that resold domain transactions sold for about twice the number of 2005, and quadruple the deal volume of 2004.  GoDaddy is now apparently adding 1 million new domains a month, which works out to one every 1.3 seconds... five times faster than five years ago according to GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons. 

This Zetetic press release claims that the average sale price during 2005 (nearly $5,000) was 8.5% higher than the previous year, while the median sale ($900) was 24% higher, as well as that the total dollar sales volume and the number of sales above $100,000 had nearly doubled.  In 2006, the average domain name resale price grew 13% to $5,582.

Several registrars and other firms do hand-appraisals of domains.  They do some statistical analysis on the domain name (is it .com or something else, how many characters is it, is it spelled properly), as well as a less precise assessment of how likable the domain is, which typically includes the sort of "comparable" search that I'd done (possibly with better data). 

None are free, but I wanted someone with a more educated opinion to give me some guidance.  I tried two of the services, GoDaddy.com and Sedo.com and will post the results when they come in.

I asked for advice both from people I knew and online in various forums, and got some interesting responses.  I got the following advice from users on a domaintools.com forum for which I'm quite grateful:

table dot com is a very strong domain name.

Although it's not the plural that most people would type in, it is still a domain that has a high monetization value and probably gets a decent amount of direct navigation (people just typing in table.com) traffic.

There are lots of advertisers paying for ads for the table keyword, so the domain can easily be monetized.

If your domain doesn't make it in this auction, I would contact moniker.com and see if they would be interested in including it in one of their upcoming auctions.

I think you would get some serious bids for your domain. Especially if you could provide some traffic stats to potential buyers.

- circler

and

First, let me congratulate you on working and/or owning a company that had the foresight to register such an impressive generic when they were freely available - that's always a good sign in my book.

-gepp

and

I think a $50,000 reserve on table.com would be considered a VERY VERY low reserve.

I'm definitely not an official domain appraiser or anything, but just looking at the current list for comparable domain names (and looking at recent sales for one word marketable domains), you can get an idea of the domains potential worth to the right buyer (a seller of tables).

To me, $100,000 would be a LOW reserve for table.com, $250,000 would be a reasonable reserve, $500,000 would be a possible reserve (but might get less bids), $1,000,000 would be a high reserve.

Again, I'm just playing armchair appraiser here, but table.com has a definite high resale value.

To the right end user buyer, it might go high 6 figures (possibly seven), to an investor, maybe low 6 figures.

- circler

and

As it was pointed out, Tables.com would be better. I think $50,000 is a healthy reserve.

- Jay

and

Table.com! I totally agree with circler. You have a piece of cyber real-estate on the prime waterfront of the Internet! $250,000 at the LOWEST for that reserve, I would think. But again, I am no expert appraiser, either. In fact, I don't put a lot of value into the paid or unpaid appraisals anyway, as they do not seem to go along with what always sells at a higher value! At any rate, you have a great name and I hope you do well with it!

- bobbyd43

I also posted a request to Digital Point's Appraisals forum, which appears to be a great site for getting some knowledgeable people to eyeball your domains, but I didn't get any responses, other than a couple of further inquiries about selling the domain.

The GoDaddy appraisal just came in.  The appraisal was somewhat broad ($67,800 - $187,250), but seemed in line with other sources.  Here are the details:

Just got the Sedo.com custom valuation for table.com.  Guess what they said?

$1,000,000!

Sedo provided a well thought-out 7-page evaluation on a number of parameters.  Here are some of the most insightful bits:

• Because "table" is a common term, this domain has the potential to capture user mindshare with only minimal marketing support
• Due to the inherently limited number of meaningful [single] words in the English language, as well as the relatively advanced state of Internet development in the English-speaking economies, these tend to be the most valuable category of domain names.
• The domain name... is resistant to traffic diversion as it is relatively easy to spell, and uses the dominant .com extension
• The domain name table.com can be categorized as a generic or descriptive name...  generic domain names are generally less susceptible to ownership disputes arising from a trademark conflict than are brandable, non-generic domain names.
• According to our analysis, table.com contains a highly popular search term.  A query of the Google search engine returns 662,000,000 results for the term table.  The overall value of the domain is increased by the term's search-popularity.   Expanding the domain's keyword-popularity could likely be accomplished with only limited marketing and branding efforts, which adds a second level of value to the domain's overall worth.
• ... considered to have high commerce potential.  [table.com] lends itself easily to beither building a website geared toward the selling of products and services, or gan garnish value through its association with a popular online industry...  table.com would be a valuable asset for any business seeking to break into this field.

Comparable recent sales*:

* noting it may be that at the time of sale there was a special interest in these domains...

The Sheboyan Press reports on 8/6/07 that "A 41-year-old Sheboygan man was charged today with selling his employer's domain name and using corporate credit cards to finance international trips with a stripper girlfriend, according to complaint filed today in Milwaukee County Circuit Court."

The domain name was sofa.com.  It would be interesting to know how he managed to sell it, and to whom!  This DN Journal article about late 2005 domain sales may contain a bit of that information.

And, given the not entirely up-and-up nature of the sale, it seems like he got a pretty good price.  So, er, congratulations?

Even more interesting that the list of sale prices from a domain auction, is a list that also includes the highest bids for items that didn't sell because they didn't meet the seller's reserve.  Since about half of the domains don't sell because the reserve is "too high," there's at least double the information here!

Here's a list of the domains and their sale prices, or the prices at which they were passed (as well as the reserve price) from The Big eDuh.com.

The always informative Jay Westerdal, who runs Domain Tools and the Domain RoundTable, comments on all of the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. East auction sales on his blog.  Westerdal lays out his feelings on all of the sold domains, including table.com, about which he says "seems expensive".  Hey, he's consistent!