Renting ?Flight.co.uk Domain Names

waddie · 12-12-06

Hi Everyone

I am looking for some guidance

I have heard about some good premium flight domain names that are about to be offered on a rental basis from a friend of mine on the QT. They are 5 or 6 years old and have really really bad content on them, they haven't been updated for 5 or 6 years. They are offering a package of 19 domain names for £35-£50 & VAT per day (guide price) Its up to me as to what content I put on them. I have checked the search term that is the same as the domain name itself i.e. xyz travel.co.uk - search term i.e. "xyz travel" some of them get over 7000 searches a month on overture alone. I know there is no guarantee as to search position but would the fact that most of them are on the first page in google for the search term with absolute garbage on them be worthwhile?

Any advice appreciated, I can't divulge the domain names without dropping my mate in the xxxx

Thanks

Waddie

Brendon · 12-12-06

>> £35-£50 & VAT per day

Per DAY!?! Unless they've got a LOT of traffic right now, tell him where to stick it. Bear in mind that positions are worthless - traffic is everything. If the sites were doing about 5k - 10k UVs / day (bare minimum), I might pay that. If not, forget it.

Flights is a pretty slim margin product, and you'd be looking at having to cover perhaps £1500 + VAT / month. I doubt you'd be able to make PPC pay with that kind of overhead, and you don't have 6 months to break into high traffic SERPs. If the sites aren't producing from day 1, you'll lose money, and lots of it.

Now, if they are doing more like 50k UV / day, it sounds far more reasonable - but for both your sakes, I'd get a proper contract, and for your sake, get some traffic SLAs in the contract - no traffic, no rental

Soletrader · 19-12-06

yep agreed. With flights you can't really afford to be spending more than a few pence per click, and even then you need to have a good conversion rate.

Just out of interest, I am currently researching a new travel merchant who has just entered the market having built a traditional offline business over the last 19 years. There is potential to make $1,000 USD per sale for a genuinely discounted product. If you're interested, let me know, but I've only got limited info at the moment.

Cheers.

pistol101 · 19-12-06

It sounds like it's got a lot of potential if you can drive long haul bookings through the site. You would just need to be drive 2 or 3 sales a day decent sales a day and you'd breakeven.

trevHCS · 19-12-06

To be honest, why not just go and buy some quirky domain names like Opodo type for £35/year and make a lot more money from them?

Good sounding domains are all very well if you can build a brand around them and people can remember them, but unless you've got a fortune to spend on mainstream advertising or as mentioned they are getting staggering traffic then they simply aren't worth a bean.

Also remember, if you were getting the 50K uniques a day that would realistically be needed for this kind of sum, you'd need to factor in quite a few servers into the costings.

Trev

aqls · 20-12-06

Note also that even though you think that the content on them is crap, it is that crap that got them to the top of the search engines, so you as the white knight coming to save the sites from bad content, may just suffocate them in your loving bosom.

£35 per day gets you some targeted ppc on a domain of your own even if you have to pay good bucks to get a goodun.

-aqls-