Are the Free Domain Appraisal Tools Worth It?

The big auction. Tuesday's top names.

Moniker has published its list of domain names for the auction in Florida which begins tonight. The opening auction will feature just a handful of names from the full list in the domain name auction portfolio.

Tonight's live "mini-auction" begins at 8 p.m. EST. The full, live auction takes place Friday.

Great news but, "so what, " you may be asking.

The reason we're posting now is because we are currently in the process of doing an informal, quasi-scientific domain name appraisal of these top names. With that data in hand, we'll be analyzing the final sales prices against our data to see if any correlations exist.

We're hoping address the question that some domain name holders periodically ask: "Are the free, online appraisal tools worth considering in getting a valid, accurate appraisal for my domains?" If you read much on the discussion boards, it would seem that many of the experts dismiss these tools out of hand, stating that they're basically worthless.

And, while that may be the case in instances where a single tool has been used; or in cases where a few of these appraisal tools have been used on a small sample of names, to the staff at Penguin Search Engine Services, Inc., these answers leave us a bit puzzled.

It would seem that, to date, and to the best of our knowledge, so far no one has published data on any type of study for the accuracy and/or validity of any online domain name appraisal tools. (If you have, please submit a comment, and we'll respond.)

In other words, while we agree, in principle that these tools are often very much off track in providing a 'worthwhile' appraisal figure, we are hoping to determine whether or not they have any possible predictive use when the results from more than one of these tools is compared with results from others, and the aggregate data further analyzed. In addition to the online appraisal tools, we are also collecting data from a few other sources: ranking tools, scoring tools, statistics from the placement of related news articles related to the domain names, etc.

In the end, this exercise may turn out to be a complete waste of time.

So be it.

On the other hand, there is a possibility that we just might discover a tidbit or two that can help those of us in the domain name game refine our process. I.e., if one does elect to proceed with ordering a paid appraisal for a domain name (or several names, for that matter), then if this methodology is even somewhat predictive in terms of determining "relative value," then this alone could help struggling domainers decide which names to pay to have "professionally" appraised. It also could be that certain types of names fare better than others. Who knows?

Enough said. It's currently 2:55 p.m. EST and we still have to complete our processing of the data for tonight's list. We're also wrapping up some benchmarking of recent names that have already sold and have sales results listed on the DNJournal site.

Stay tuned!