Mobile Phones .co.uk up for auction
It’s not often that a premium .co.uk domain with mass market appeal gets auctioned but mobilephones.co.uk is currently being auctioned on Sedo, the current bid is £25k and the reserve has been met with only one bid so far.
Apparently phones.co.uk was sold for £175k a couple of years ago so it will be interesting to see if this reaches the £1m mark. What do you guys think, how much will this domain get sold for? Could you use the exact match domain to rank for “mobile phones” as a keyword or is the brand algorithm too strong in this sector?
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Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
Read the 13 comments below, or add your own!
Can’t see this hitting the price phones got @£175k, likely around £100k would be my guess, will be interesting to watch though!
I think it’ll top out around high xx,xxx unless a few bidders get into a bidding war.
I wouldn’t even bother trying to rank that. Too much well-established competition on that term.
Yep Andy is right, it is a very competitive sector. £1m is way, way, way too much.
£100k would be a fair price.
not worth it!
Simply buy something like mobilephonestwist.co.uk instead if the goal is seo.
I’m with everyone else that 100k would be about right. I also think the owner might have held onto this one a little too long.
It may offer a small boost from the domain name, but anybody paying 100k based on SEO benefit is IMO optimising based on an old algorithm. The domain has only ever existed as a parked page, having no history (link or content wise) worth speaking of. It’s not going to rank anytime soon for that phrase.
Still, there’s some massive players in that field, and as long as one of them belives it’s the magic bullet it might still fetch an (unworthy) 6 figures.
still 5 hours left but hasn’t broke 50k yet. i’m with @MatthewOxley…no domain history to push this one too high
Finished at 91500
Paying this much money for a domain name in today’s conditions is not money well spent in my opinion. Given that the average EPC rate in the mobile sector is £0.50 at best, and a good click through rate for visitors is about 50% at best you would be looking at getting around 91,500 visitors to your site before you got a return on your investment for the domain name alone. This negates the fact that you would need to impliment a hefty marketing, SEO and PPC campaign to bring those visitors to the site which I would estimate to be at least £150,000. So for a cool qtr mill, you need deep pockets to make the money back. I would suggest that picking an unregistered short domain name and spending £91,000 promoting it would be a much better use of capital and would provide a quicker more lucrative ROI. Good luck to whoever got this one though, it’s a little like having your own personlised number plate, looks good but doesn’t really do much!
It can cost £30,000 for a full page colour ad in a newspaper which is thrown away the next day, for an keyword exact match, memorable domain in a sector that’s built on subscriptions it’s not that much and I have a hunch it may not be an end user that’s bought it as there is room to still make a profit on it.
Well the latest news on this auction is. The seller is not going to complete the sale. Love to see what SEDO does now. Any ideas what will happen now?
It will be put up again and the reserve put higher or it will be sold on the side. I am guess that some one offered him more on the side if he backed out as it did hit above reserve.
it’s a really good busines to buy a domain and sell it in the future.