A look in this post about why eBay may not be the best place to list your LLLL.coms (or other short domains for that matter) unless you place a reserve to ensure you get what you’re after. We’ll look at some of the past eBay prices versus the median LLLL.com sale over the months.

November 2007 had a median LLLL.com price of $35, yet LLLL.coms sold on eBay had a median selling price of just $22.50. December 2007 saw the median LLLL.com sell for $41.00, yet on eBay the median LLLL.com price was only $31.00. What about November 2008? We have a median LLLL.com price here of $21.00, however the median LLLL.com price on eBay was but $14.20.

Enough months looked at to be statistically significant? Probably not — it’s too bad I hadn’t compared eBay LLLL.com performance to that of the overall LLLL.com market more often than in the past. Nevertheless, I’m reasonably confident from my experience in the LLLL.com market that we’d see similar differences between LLLL.com sales outside eBay and LLLL.coms sales on eBay in the other months as well. I’ve discussed reasons for this many times in the past — type “eBay” in the search bar for more information.

Domain name forums have also historically been a weak market for LLLL.coms, except right at buyout when they were selling like hotcakes on NamePros and were even of reasonable popularity on DNF. Today, most DNFers aren’t interested in a whole lot of LLLL.coms other than the very high quality ones and most NPers are looking for good deals rather than to pay full market value because, unlike ahortly post-buyout, they’re reasonably confident prices are going to rise dramatically in a very short period of time.

Looking at some real numbers now, let’s look at LLLL.com sales since March 1st, 2009 — I think prices have been reasonably stable since then, however do feel free to suggest a different date if you think I’m not being fair here. There have been 3087 reported LLLL.com sales since March 1st, 2009. Of these, 138 occurred on Sedo, 364 occurred on NameJet, and 137 occurred on SnapNames. Subtracting the LLLL.com sales that occurred on these 3 venues from the 3087 reported LLLL.com sales leaves us with 2448 LLLL.com sales. Roughly 21% of domains were sold at NameJet, SnapNames, or Sedo.

Let’s remember that many of the LLLL.coms sold on SnapNames, NameJet, and Sedo, would have sold for significant premiums regardless of where they were sold, so I don’t see it being fair to exclude them as being outliers on the high end any moreso than doing the same to eBay on the low end. I’ve sold about 300 LLLL.coms now from a lot I’m brokering and I haven’t yet sold anything under $5 per, with the average around $12 per so far. All of the LLL.coms have been anti-premium through triple premium in quality, with most of the LLLL.coms between anti-premium and double premium. I haven’t been pushing the sales particularly hard either — just been letting them naturally come about, along with a bit of promotion which anyone would do if they were trying to sell such a large number of LLLL.coms.

So far on eBay, I’ve sold between 20-25% of the LLLL.coms I’ve listed, all of which have had starting bids of $6.99 and ending prices between $6.99 and $7.51. Many of the LLLL.coms which did sell for $6.99+ were not of noticeably higher quality than the ones which didn’t.

Related posts:

1. eBay LLLL.com Price Guide
2. December 2007 LLLL.com Price Guide
3. Bad LLLL.coms: What does Minimum Wholesale Really Mean?