Depressing (1.Viewing)

I was just on DNJournal and once again, not a single .ca reported sold. It bothers me greatly because I've been waiting for 20 years for the .ca market to really take off. Yet there are so few .ca sales being reported.

Are you not reporting? (Ron loves reports of sales as long as you can back it up)
Not selling?
Are you actively engaged in efforts to sell?
Making no effort at all?

Why?

Quite honestly there is not much to report, the few sales I am getting are all in the 5k range and any offers I have on my premiums are too low, I simply ignore the offer and go on with my day.

I think there is a lot of holding going on and the majority of the movement is in the 1-3k range. For me I don't sell in that range but a number of domainers I know do quite well in that space.

The reason you are not reading about any sales is because there is only sub level activity.

Quite honestly it has always been my opinion that most higher .ca sales were anomalies generated by domainers. The recent hush.ca sale was probably the only sale of significance but the sale (reportedly over a million) is probably skewed because it was technically not a real domain sale. A lot of the sale price was because hush.ca was actively used as a website and the owner had to have a significant offer to move the business to a two word address. Had the sale been strictly for an unused domain I doubt the price would have been anywhere near a million.

That said the .ca is ripe with inventory, domainers are sitting on a large inventory, but if my inbox is any indication there is going to be a sell off coming. I have been actively pursuing .ca purchases and for a long time I had to hunt owners down. Now I am being contacted one or two times a week from people with nice domains that are willing to part with them. The problem is there are only so many times I am willing to part with 10k to buy from a domainer so I am finding myself saying no more often than not.

As far as two word domains go, I rarely ever look at them anymore and if the listings on the forum are any indication the resale values are pretty poor. I hand register two words like SilverStyle.ca if they make sense to me for use in commerce but if a domainer asked me to pay $100 for it I would have turned it down.

Domainers have to create interest, we have to educate people as to the value of domains but as you can see by the level of activity on the board nobody is really interested in generating a proper .ca resource to educate potential clients. I have been trying to get traction for this forum since November and other than a few spurts of activity most everyone that comes to read never posts. I look at the stats, I see tons of visits but no posts. DNJournal means nothing to perspective clients, we need a Canadian resource to show the value of .ca and I have tried there but it seems to be a one man show, so much so that I have thought about moving the resource to blog.dn.ca and transitioning from a forum to a blog format. I mean if I am going to be the only one starting articles why put in an effort maintaining a community.

So yes, I get your point, I am not depressed but definitely saddened by the lack of interest in .ca on the domainer end, if we cannot get excited and create a buzz how can we expect our clients too?

I agree with much of what [notify]MapleDots[/notify] said, but I also think the lack of sales data boils down to the fact that almost nobody is reporting their sales to namebio. Not individual people, nor marketplaces.

I'm rather certain the only marketplace that will report .CA sales is Sedo, and that's only if the sale is 2K+. I like the 2K mark, as smaller 3-figure sales aren't exactly helpful, but Sedo is kinda fading in the wind and we can't really rely on them to pump out tons of sale data, especially when less and less Canadians are using Sedo (and I never felt like Canadian buyers really trusted Sedo to begin with).

But lots of sales are still happening, and we'll just never know about it. They mostly fall into the 1-5K range [notify]MapleDots[/notify] mentioned, but I'd still love to see them on namebio (generally speaking).

I've actually seen a pile of sales mentioned on Twitter lately, and I'm actually trying to convince them to report them to namebio. He probably has 5 decent sales from the past 2-3 weeks that would look very nice on the charts.

I've also already convinced a few people to report sales that would have not been reported otherwise, but clearly we do need a lot more reporting as it is depressing.

I myself will continue to report what makes sense. Some don't want to report anything below 2K but I think 1K+ is alright for some domains (like blackmold for example). There's really no magic number to decide when to report, as it always depends on the domain... and perhaps the relationship you have with the buyer. Quite honestly I'm not crazy about seeing john .ca sell for 5K, as I think it should have been closer to 25K, but hey it's not terrible and I think it was bought by domain investor which makes it different.

In short, we all need to try and report sales ourselves if we don't want the charts to look so depressing.

PS: If GoDaddy reported every .CA sale to DNjournal / Namebio I bet we'd be blown away with the amount of sales happening on the daily, but we'd also see a lot of weak sales too.

MapleDots said:

As far as two word domains go, I rarely ever look at them anymore and if the listings on the forum are any indication the resale values are pretty poor. I hand register two words like SilverStyle.ca if they make sense to me for use in commerce but if a domainer asked me to pay $100 for it I would have turned it down.

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Sorry for going offtopic, but that's funny, I used to be part of a shortlived game development project/company that was called SilverStyle for a bit

Esdiel said:

I agree with much of what [notify]MapleDots[/notify] said, but I also think the lack of sales data boils down to the fact that almost nobody is reporting their sales to namebio. Not individual people, nor marketplaces. .

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Sorry, not at all familiar with Namebio. The standard for domainers here since the beginning has been DNJournal. Every domainer here since the late 1990s or early 2000, knows Ron. These are the people sitting on all the category killer domains.

Sedo has been more European-centric, we don't get much attention from them. And they had some troubles early in their history, thus people not trusting them much.

I gave some serious thought years ago to launching a sales channel for .ca & .us, which has suffered the same neglect.