REGGAE.COM Up For Auction On August 18With a minimum starting bid of US$100,0o0, and an expected sale price of between US$100,001 and $250,000, the owners of the domain name Reggae.com have announced (for the first time in its history) that the domain will be placed on auction on Wednesday, August 18, at the New York 2010 edition of DOMAINFest®, a one-day conference and networking event for domainers (buyers and sellers of domain names).
The domain was originally registered in 1995, and according to Google, the word “reggae” gets approximately 13,600,000 globally searches every month. In the domain business, searches usually mean money (revenue), and by any measure 13 million monthly searches is a lot, thus the domain’s owners will likely be looking at this and other factors, such as the global popularity of the genre and its dancehall offspring, as they seek to secure bids from deep pocketed investors.
On paper, the minimum starting bid for reggae.com may seem standard or even cheap to domain investors, because there aren’t many other music genre dotcom domains that would start as low as US$100K – imagine hiphop.com or jazz.com, the starting price tag would likely be far higher. To be ignored is the fact that reggae.com is currently a hideous-looking mid-1990s style webpage, because domain investors look more at the potential – how the domain and brand can be developed and grown into a crisp online moneymaking machine. There are, however, other factors to consider as you look to determine if the price tag is worthy, most important of which is the spending behavior of the demographic that the domain would likely target. It’s no secret that outside of Japan and sections of Europe, the hardcore reggae (and dancehall) demographic does not like to spend money to buy the product – simply put, they prefer to bootleg, than to spend money to buy the music.
That aside, there is usually a dancehall/reggae ‘flavour of the year’, that manages to crossover to the U.S. and international audiences that spend money on the product. This year its Gyptian, with his “Hold You” album [ Amazon | iTunes ], and last year it was Serani and Sean Paul respectively. If reggae.com is actually sold at the upcoming auction, these and other factors will play a key role in determining whether or not the investment can be recouped over a reasonable period of time (and thus whether the price tag is reasonable or not). From dancehall.mobi’s perspective, this domain would only be worth it if the new owners find a way to develop a cross-language product that seeks to tap into the markets that actually spend money on the reggae genre.
REGGAE.COM Up For Auction On August 18
