I noticed this morning in my Domain Closing Auctions report that DomainExpert.com was up for auction via SEDO…..

After checking out the auction listing, I decided that it would be worth $2k to purchase DomainExpert.com; the auction was to end around 12:15pm EST today….Of course I got lost in the day and when I just checked the SEDO auction page, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the domain sold for $15,112 – (of course I wouldn’t be pleasantly surprised if I really wanted to buy it, LOL)

Who do you think bought this??

@AndrewHazen

Chris Chena’s initial interview with DNJournal shook up the domaining community. Many were left wondering, how does a kid from Paraguay build the leading Spanish domain portfolio?

I also thought, damn why didn’t I invest more in Spanish names earlier on. Maybe I wasn’t there in time for the 90’s but I was certainly into domaining by 2005-2006 when Spanish domaining opportunities still existed. As a recap, Chris Chena started Chena Ventures, which owns jaw-droppers like Coches.com (“Cars” in Spanish), Clasificados.com(“Classifieds” in Spanish) and Viajes.com (“Trips” in Spanish).

Not only is Chena a major portfolio-holder but he has begun building-out his names. Coches.com for instance is a beautiful looking site with a global Alexa rank of 69,297.

If this isn’t a great business model to repeat, I don’t know what is. Why don’t you become Chris Chena v. 2.0? The opportunity is still there in the Asian and Middle-Eastern markets. The luxury of being from Paraguay meant that Chris already spoke the language. But if you hire a translator you will be on a level playing field in no time.

Ultimate early internet domain name play story. In this excerpt Michael Robertson tells how he came
to own mp3.com and what happened when he ‘turned on’ the traffic.

Michael Robertson tells the story of mp3.com.

In addition to starting mp3.com (later sold to Vivendi), Michael Robertson founded Lindows
(Linspire) and SIPphone (becamse Gizmo5, recently sold to Google). He’s now focused on
building mp3Tunes.com which allows users to store their music in the cloud and access it from
anywhere. Check out the entire interview at ThisWeekIn.com.

Due to the overwhelming interest in his purchase of CookingGames.com, Bill Kara has prepared the following guest post telling of another amazing generic .com. I hand it to Bill as being a great businessman who knows the power of the perfect generic domain for his areas of expertise. Please read on.

If you think Hallpass Media paid alot for cookinggames.com (350k) then
you might be surprised at what we paid for stickgames.com…

We had been looking for a number of niche game sites for a while, in
the crowded field of online gaming very few things set you apart from
the next site offering virtually all the same games. Having prime
domains is one of the few affordable options we had left. We filtered
out our most popular content areas and stick games were consistently a
top section.

“Stick Games are stick figures doing an assortment of things, most
often blowing each other up in various creative ways.”

I went after the top dog of course which was stickgames.com. It was
parked and owned by one of the hardest, most stubborn and least
motivated sellers on earth. This was not good news for us.

The domain was getting tons of traffic (confirmed between 1000-1500
type in a day) and the owners after our first contact wanted 250k for
the domain, no stats and no revenue figures to be provided. I knew the
domain was making nothing for them though, by using automated parking
technology I could see all the ads were displaying “stick” game type
stuff. Like hockey, skating and ads of this nature. I knew the
disconnect was there and viewers were coming to play games and being
shown hockey ads so the click through rates must have been nil. I
countered offered with a final offer of 100k after a few weeks of back
and forth they relented.

StickGames.com a domain unsuccessfully selling hockey sticks and
skates, with traffic coming from stickmen blowing each other up was
sold for a 100k, a 6 figure sum.

Story continues…

We did our development and quickly gained the number one spot on
google for “stick games”, even though the previous first place was to
a site with SEVEN times our traffic and had been developed for at
leave FIVE years before us. Generic advantage? Perhaps.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/stickgames.com+stickpage.com/

It was alot of hard work and networking with many more factors then
I’ve been able to list, but the point is a good business plan, hard
work and the right assets in this case strong generic domains have
helped us in a very crowded and competitive market. We are on track to
recover our investment cost in the next 3 months, during one of the
worst recessions of our time. Still deals to be had, still many
opportunities to be had. Best of luck everyone one!

PS when you’re not working, you should be gaming:) More stories to
come in 2010…

www.stickgames.com “Stick Games”
www.girlgames.com “GIrl Games”
www.wordgames.com “Word Games”
www.guygames.com “Guy Games”
www.juegosgratis.com “Juegos Gratis”

www.hallpassmedia.com “Hallpass Media”

Related posts:

1. Cookinggames.com sells for $350,000 – WTF ?