The Fromainer

I was browsing the marketplace auction listings at Sedo yesterday afternoon and came across a domain name going for much less than I would’ve thought it was worth. The domain in question is Advertisement.TV and it looks like it was pushed to auction on a $70 opening bid. I thought this was absolutely insanely low!

Now I know domain prices can sometimes appear quite arbitrary and have no rhyme or reason but this is usually not so in the case of one word generics such as this. The term gets 165,000 exact global searches a month according to the Google keyword tool and is surely worth a lot more than $70 by virtue of the fact that one of the primary mediums for advertisements, a huge market,  is on the TV.
Of course the extension .TV is actually the ccTLD for Tuvalu and actually has nothing to do with television at all whatsoever but it is certainly with television that the domaining community has come to associate the extension.

At the time of writing this the domain name has recieved several more bids since I saw it and is currently on $1000 with just over 5 days to go so the price may or may not increase dramatically. This is one auction I shall be watching closely.
Other .TV sales according to DNJournal are as follows…

Shoes.TV – $18,000
Business.TV – $100,999
Learn.TV – $41,000
Christmas.TV – $32,000
Home.TV – $31,000
Guide.TV – $29,500
Job.TV – $25,500
Jobs.TV – $20,500
Beauty.TV – $20,500
Italy.TV – $19,000
D.TV – $18,000
Wine.TV – $17,002
In.TV – $16,550
Real.TV – $15,500
Vacation.TV – $14,000
Stream.TV – $13,755
Loans.TV – $13,600
Telefon.TV – $13,300

I believe Advertisement.TV is just as good as any of the above if not better so I will be interested in seeing what it actually goes for, not only because of the ridiculously low opening bid but also because it might be yet further evidence of the value placed upon .TV domains.

I recently hand reg’d CurrentNews.TV which could potentially be an excellent video news site, with the exact term getting a very respectable 60,000+ searches every month.

There have been a few posts recently regarding accepting seemingly low opening bids on domains resulting in potential losses.
Acro at DomainGang wrote a post about the sale of AKME.com, a name which was sold at Namejet for $676 only to be sold on at a loss for $419.
Shane of DomainShane later wrote a follow up defending the sale and loss, putting it down to luck and knowing when to sell or not to sell a domain.

Using a services such as NameBio, Estibot and Valuate can be useful in ascertaining the value and sale prices of similar domains and might have saved the seller of AKME.com from the loss that he/she made so be sure to establish your absolute lowest offer before you accept one.
You may get lucky and receive enough exposure on the auction to attract other bidders, but you might be unlucky and end up throwing a good domain name and money down the pan.