Pardon the double post, but I did a little more research, and I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I don't think this site is accurately reflecting the net worth of domain names. Here's why:
1. Last I checked, the cost to register a domain name for one year was somewhere around $70.
2. We
know that all domain names are not created equal. Gibberish names like 56aq22dnj4a are worth less than non-gibberish domain names like bluetowel or vanillapine, and those domain names are in turn worth less than the (obviously already-scooped-up) domain names for commercial products like charmin.com or clorox.com. If you name your site "pokemonchampions.com", it's going to be more likely to be seen than if you name it "9nssjr5594smddslsdlditro.com". Besides, nobody wants to type that nonsense in, but words are easy to remember and people don't mind typing in 20, 30 characters all that much so long as they understand what it is that they're typing.
So given these two observations, check this out:
www.ujhcp.com has a reported worth of $2,826.80. That is grossly inflated by my estimates. It should only be worth $70:
period. It's a gibberish domain name for a site that doesn't exist. How can a site that doesn't even exist have thousands of dollars worth of value?
bluetowel.com is at least not gibberish, but lo and behold it's worth ever so slightly less: $2,763.80.
bluepikachu.com = $2,433.20.
pikablu.com = $2,616.20.
pikachuforest.com is worth $2,960.60. Ridiculous.
It doesn't get much better with one-letter off domain names. Some of them are over-inflated, and others seem to be barely above the baseline pricepoint of 2,000-odd dollars.
So, here's my recommendation:
divide any of the figures you see by at least a factor of 35 (since $2,500 as an average divided then by 35 produces $70, the cost to register a new domain name) and that should give you a slightly more accurate result. [hide]So ...
Akiba-Online's $14.57 million divided by 35 would be about $416,285. That's still respectable, but it's by no means "retire to the Maldives" material. It's enough to buy a nice home in up-front cash and cover the real estate tax costs for maybe the next 5 to 10 years, and that's about it. It's enough to pay off your college loans, buy a car, and put a down payment down on a house.
The other thing is ... these values are sort of like stock values. They're all theoretical. They all presume that you can find an interested buyer to whom you can sell your property. Akiba-Online isn't genuinely worth $400,000 or $14,000,000 to chompy just yet: it's worth whatever cash-in-hand ad revenue he gets minus the costs he incurs from server fees and whatnot. It'd only be worth 6, 7, or 8 figures if he could find somebody willing to buy it and could clinch the sale. That's a mighty big assumption even in times of loose spending, but in today's economy I think it's bordering on asinine-ridiculous. Nobody is going to pay $14 million for this site. Why would you pay $14 million only to turn around and find yourself saddled with forum maintenance, server issues, etc. and all for nickels and dimes you get from ad revenue? :\ Anybody who bought A-O for $14 million would turn right around and sell it to the
next guy in line, and so on and so forth.
And I'm not saying that to put down A-O. I'm saying this is true for
any domain which isn't attached to a nationally or internationally-famous brand name. Oprah Winfrey's existence makes oprah.com have intrinsic net value well in excess of tens of thousands of dollars -- simply because she's got rich enough, fanatic enough of fans who would be willing to pay that much to own oprah.com. Likewise, clorox.com has intrinsic value -- because you can bank on somebody being really bored on summer day and going on Google and typing in "clorox" to see what comes up and then visiting your site. leonardodicaprio.com, playstation.com, marbles.com, etc. These are domain names which already have value even with no site to back them up. But a name like "Hongfire" or "Akiba-Online" or "Serebii" or "xkcd" or (etc etc) has no value on its own. Its only value stems from the material on the site and the traffic which that material attracts.
In other words ...
the domain name "Akiba-Online" isn't what's worth all that money. The traffic the domain name witnesses is what's worth the money. That's what a guy would theoretically be paying for if he bought A-O off of chompy: he'd be paying for us. He'd be banking on us staying here despite change of ownership and any possible change of rules that might come with it. And he'd be banking on the ad companies still saying, "Yeah, these folks are worth a lot of money." Which they could always change their minds about at any time without warning. Especially since more and more people are finding out just how easy it is to browse the Internet with ads disabled -- pop-ups, banner ads, the whole schebang.[/hide]
If this is to be believed, though, then (a) congrats chompy, and (b) holy shit. o_o
