In case you missed the point, sex sells. And so does the sex.com domain name--for $12 million. With this news wafting around, I foresee a fresh wave of interest in the domain aftermarket. It's a bit of a nostalgia trip for me, I must admit. A decade ago, when the going rate for registering a domain jumped from gratis to 50 bucks a year, then-freelance reporter Joshua Quittner registered mcdonalds.com so that he could write about the process. He penned a funny series of articles about how clueless corporations were about the Internet, which unfortunately ushered in a wave of shakedowns, as the unscrupulous registered trademarks and tried to sell them to their owners. Even Quittner extracted money from the burger people in exchange for the brand-name domain, but with a characteristic wink, he asked Mickey D's to pay the $3,500 to a public school in Brooklyn.

It's been interesting to see domain names trading over the years. In 1997, business.com sold for $150,000, then sold again two years later for $7.5 million. Then the bubble burst, of course, and that seemed like an awfully big number. But high-profile, easy-to-remember domain names were commanding pretty good prices as recently as two years ago, when me.com sold for $460,000.

You know, all this talk of domains and money is making me hungry. I've got some pretty decent domain names, so I think I'm going to sell one and retire from this business, maybe donate some money to a public school in Brooklyn. And I know just how I'm going to do it.

Step right up!
A few years back, I registered two domain names for a little side business and wound up using only one of them. On reflection, I used the more obscure name. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I figured that Amazon wasn't a byword for mail-order literature until Jeff Bezos made it one, so why wouldn't the same principle work for my business? A rational voice could have explained why not, if I'd only listened. (The gist of the message: "Bezos exudes business acumen from his pores, and you don't.") My obscure domain name remains obscure, so obscure that I won't even use this column to dredge it into the public eye. But I think my spare domain name has potential in the domain market. (And because of that, I won't mention its name here either, since that would be tacky self-promotion.)

So my first step in trying to sell this domain was to scope out sites that sold used domain names. In the end, I settled on two likely places, the venerable domain auction house Afternic and the newer Domain Name Aftermarket (TDNAM), a puppy in the kennel of that attack dog of domain registrars, GoDaddy.

	For a few hundred bucks apiece, they were shifting names such as coffeefair.com, endsuffering.com, and my personal favorite, kungfujesus.com.

There are other places where domains change hands, but I liked the character of these two contenders. I don't have a domain of sex.com proportions to sell, so I'm not about to go to the domain aftermarket equivalent of Saks Fifth Avenue to hawk my wares. A virtual mall with personality seemed a more appropriate venue. I liked the names of domains trading at Afternic and TDNAM. For a few hundred bucks apiece, they were shifting names such as coffeefair.com, endsuffering.com, and my personal favorite, kungfujesus.com. Some more businesslike domains were shifting for thousands of dollars, but I was looking for a more modest return on the hundred-odd dollars it cost to keep a domain for seven years. The down-to-earth pricing of the domain names that were selling at Afternic and TDNAM seemed more in my league.

But some of the prices people were asking were downright ridiculous. Spurred by memories of sex.com and business.com, some sad characters were trying to tout hokey .biz names for hundreds of thousands of dollars, without getting any bids. To spare myself that embarrassment, I needed to set a price that suits a market lacking in irrational exuberance. And frankly, I haven't the first idea what the market for domains can bear.

What am I bid for&?
There is, however, a thriving trade in appraisal services for people like me. Most domain name aftermarket venues will charge a small fee to analyze a domain name and figure out what the market will bear for such a name. At the low end of the appraisal business are $5-to-$10 appraisals that analyze domains for desirable qualities, such as shortness and business-friendly words, and undesirable ones, such as hyphens and weird mixtures of letters and numbers. The heuristics involved in these calculations are mumbo jumbo to me, so the only way to figure out if they're worth anything is to buy some appraisals and see how close they are to the selling price.

At the time of this writing, my domain name has not sold. I'm not going to skew the results by mentioning the domain by name or even saying which aftermarket I'm selling it in. What I will say: I paid just less than five bucks to get an automated appraisal from TDNAM.com, which shared some good news: This site (a GoDaddy property, remember) reckoned from a superficial analysis that the domain could fetch somewhere between $722.00 and $2,094 on the open market. And I was right about my other domain, the one I'm actually using: To an asset-stripper looking for a domain name alone, it's worth about 50 bucks.

There's something rather unsatisfying about a mechanical appraisal of a domain. For one thing, TDNAM.com doesn't really explain what goes into the process or why one domain is appraised at a tenth the value of the other. On the secure login section of its Web site, which contains the appraisals I paid for, there's a section called Methodology, but its contents are incredibly vague. Sentences beyond vague include: "Our rating methodology includes metrics found at all domain appraisal sites, as well as proprietary factors available only from the #1 registrar in the world, GoDaddy.com." In short, a mechanical appraisal such as this may be useful for estimating a buy or sell price or perhaps for determining asset values for taxes or insurance, but it's not much of a marketing tool.

In my opinion
That's why Afternic and TDNAM both offer higher-end "seal of approval" appraisals that you can use in their marketplaces. The metrics on these appraisals include a personal, subjective element from an expert in the field (or flimflam on the part of the company--who knows?). Afternic charges $19.95 for the privilege; TDNAM.com, in true GoDaddy discount mode, drops the price to $14.95. In both cases, a certified appraisal gives you the right to flag any domain you sell in their marketplace so that prospective buyers can see the appraisal. If you're serious about selling a domain, this is not only a useful guideline, it can also be a marketing tool.

So I tried out both marketplaces to see how they appraised my domain. The news wasn't as good this time around. On second thought, TDNAM.com knocked down the appraised value of my precious cargo to $622 to $1,617--a C-note off the low end and almost a grand off the high end. But at least it gave me an idea of their appraisal process.

	In the aftermarket, a dot-com domain is worth more than any other extension, such as .net, .org, or .biz.

The mantra for getting top dollar on an aftermarket domain is pretty straightforward. Short names are good; mixtures of numbers, letters, and hyphens in a domain name are not. Words that are in vogue help jack up the price of a domain, generic names less so. In the aftermarket, a dot-com domain is worth more than any other extension, such as .net, .org, or .biz. And that's about it. The rest is in the details.

So here I stand, a domain in my portfolio appraised between $622 and $1,617, and I'm ready to bring it to market. I'm going with the Domain Name Aftermarket as the venue for this sale. The question that will remain unanswered until the gavel drops: will I get anywhere near the appraised value?

Is Matt Lake a domain maestro? Or does he appraise his opinions higher than the information market can bear? Share your domain-aftermarket opinions and experiences in the feedback section below.