Leapfish or leapwish your domain value |
Need a good chuckle this morning?
Similar to my feelings about the accuracy of Alexa stats, I don’t think much of any of these automated domain appraisal services. According to Leapfish the makeyougohmm.com domain is worth $19,838. Considering this blog as of this writing currently has 908,575 words in 3,303 posts that works out to be roughly .02 per word and $6.01 per post.
Curious if aging had something to do with their algo, I tried a domain of ours from 1999:
Notice the red text? I’m supposed to contact them? Imagine that.
The comments about hyphenated domains not being as valuable as non-hypenated domains is mildly interesting considering they placed this domain as more valuable than a hypenated one.
Yahoo is worth an estimated $1.3 million, while eBay is worth $2.3 million. These domains appraisals received red text too. I think the Yahoo and eBay execs faces would be red from laughter with offers like these.
Did this post make you go hmm?
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Just checked my domains……I’M RICH!!!!
Comment by orangecrush — May 20, 2006 @ 4:14 pm PST
Ok. Ok. I see how the tool could be considered a novelty item. And in fact, when you checked those sites, it was with the old algorithm that I threw together before leaving for bootcamp. I just graduated basic training about a week ago and rewrote the algorithm to be a little more realistic. Just keep in mind that it is automated…which means its not perfect.
About the “…seek the services of a complete domain name appraisal company…”, that is not refering to me. I don’t offer that service, this site is purely a project for me.
Your site is now estimated at $4,524.00 which is mostly affected by the fact that it has a history. Yahoo is estimated at over 8 million, and Google is so high it falls off the charts. Sites with values higher than 1 million I assume are out of range of the algorithm as far as even being close to what you could get.
So anyway, maybe you will like it better now.
Comment by Jeremy Harris — July 13, 2006 @ 8:06 pm PST
Appreciate the official response, Jeremy. Just ran through a few more of our domains and others through it and the values returned still don’t seem anywhere near realistic, sorry.
For example, we used an established site that is generating mid five figures per month in advertising and your tool said the domain was worth $42,000 and some change. No way.
Don’t need or expect perfection from an automated tool but whatever algorithm you created isn’t taking into account enough for site age (I used several older sites to balance against the algorithm and it returned less value than some newer domains with not nearly the traffic or history). And history typically makes a site worth more, not less, which makes your estimate for this site which has gone down even more vexing.
Also things to consider: Google PR, size of passive and active community base, opt-in email lists, advertising revenue … all things that would dramatically impact the value of a domain. Being a programmer myself, I can see this being a challenging set of data to analyze, extrapolate and come up with some realistic approximations, especially considering there is no way you are going to be able scrape a site or tap an API with some of this site-specific and proprietary data.
I would add a huge disclaimer to the site that clearly says it doesn’t take into account (any / very few?) business factors which can add substantial value to a domain.
Lastly, I noticed that your website indicated is relies on archive.org for data. We’ve been noticing archive.org getting increasingly worse, particularly the waybackmachine which is falling behind for some of our sites.
Best of luck with this and future projects.
Comment by TDavid — July 13, 2006 @ 9:51 pm PST