How Do You Value A Domain Name?
The simple answer is you can’t very easily. At the end of the day it’s only worth what people are willing to pay but today domains are worth more than they were a few years ago.
For the last couple of months I have been dabbling in buying and selling domains with limited success so therefore I thought I would write a little guide to help those of you who might want to sell a domain. I will be creating a blog entry in the next couple of days which will include on advice for selling but to start with I will try and help you work out a price/value.
There are a few ways to try and find a value for your domain. To help us in this process there are a few websites you can use and also a couple of methods:
1). Visit the website www.dnsaleprice.com and type in the keywords which are included in your domain. For example, if you own the website www.moneysaving.com type in ‘money saving’. Then select what extension your site has (eg. 2 in our case), then select the amount of words, which is 2. Once you have filled out all the details, hit ‘Go’.
This will return a list of results of previously sold domains names which are similar to the one you want to value. This is only a rough guide but it works rather well. The site will display the name, how much it was sold for and when. Example below:
This of course is only a rough guide but it will give you some indication of what it may be worth using similar keywords. I currently have a money related domain which has some very good keywords but I am going to build it up before I sell it.
2). Take a look at www.dnscoop.com – this will tell you a lot of statistical information about any domain name including, Alexa Rank, valid page rank, number of one way back links, traffic indicators and a rough estimation of value. Takes a few seconds to load after inputting the domain name and values can be way off. For example, the site thinks this website (www.jamesmunday.net) is worth:
Personally I don’t think this website is worth anything, ok it may get a fair bit of traffic but it doesn’t sell anything. Oh yeah, that little image above with the value in is created on the dnscoop site 
3). Another tool worth trying is www.estibot.com. This is a domain appraisal site which also gives you information similar to www.dnscoop.com. Personally I don’t find it very accurate because I used it on one of the domains which I have had appraised by someone else and Estibot think its only worth the reg fee I paid for it!
4). Last but not least, try asking on forums like Digital Point etc. People on there can give you free appraisals and are generally quite helpful. You can also sell domains on there too but as mentioned above, in a few days I will write a guide on selling domains.
I hope this has been of some use and as always, please feel free to leave a comment
“The simple answer is you can’t very easily. At the end of the day it’s only worth what people are willing to pay but today domains are worth more than they were a few years ago.”
This is true to an extent. The market will usually price a domain, but gut feeling can make you money also. Not necessarily for resale, but with domain parking. I have a couple domains pulling in $xx/day that I’m sure no one would buy–even for $50–just cause of the “domain name.” Got lucky with them and saw an opportunity to make money and they have been working out nicely.
Overall, very nice article. Great work.
thanks for mentioning dnscoop, i’ll have to check it out.
cool, it thinks its worth $4,429.
quite a bit lower than i’d sell it for, but still pretty reasonable.
wow, its says i’m worth $3,481.
cool, i’m selling!