This is a guest post by Sean Sullivan who is responsible for the content.
Sean Sullivan is Founder & CEO of BankAds a monetization solutions provider for financial related domains. Sean is also the owner of several other companies within digital advertising in a number of verticals, including Coups.com, a digital coupon services company. Sean and his wife Erika, are also founders of BreastWeddingEver!, a charitable organization that helps couples raise money to fight breast cancer through weddings. 100% of all funds donated go direct to the foundations that BWE supports, BreastWeddingEver.com
“”First and foremost, some disclosure here, my company (companies) are deeply involved within the business and monetization of healthcare related URLS. That said, I can assure you that the information that I’m going to provide you with, is highly accurate and reflective of not only what’s going on within the aftermarket, but within the healthcare industry as well.
So the first question isn’t really if there’s value in these domains, because that’s obvious. Anything that’s a hot button issue or in the news on a daily basis, if you have a high traffic or search volume EMD domain, there’s obvious value there. How much value is certainly a better question.
The first question really should be, what kind of money can actually be made with these kinds of domains.
The answer is, more than you think.
You see, the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, as most of us have come to know it, is a very divisive topic. According to some polls by Pew Research Foundation, it is overall not in favor with most Americans and is at all time lows with regard to its popularity. There’s some recently collected data that actually conflicts with the Pew Data which will get to later, but suffice it to say that Obamacare is a lightning rod for two things right now, intense debate and large sums of money.
News outlets, be it print, web, radio or TV on both the right and the left, are all making incredible sums of money by doing one thing really well, keeping everyone guessing. Today, September 30th, we’re literally on the eve of a potential government shutdown because one political party wishes to unwind the law that is Obamacare. This couldn’t be better news for media outlets, as people are tuning in or opening up their browsers to find out the latest news.
So how can domain owners make money from all of this? Should you be rushing out to hand register all of the very best Obamacare related domains you can? Well, no, not really, not unless you plan on actually doing something with them. As in developing and not just parking them. Otherwise its probably a waste of your time and money.
As much as I would like to believe what Paul Nicks, Director at GoDaddy recently said in a Fox News article with regard to the value of Obamacare related domains being, it just is not reflective of the sales that have been happening within the last few months. Just because people are placing absurd price tags on their domains, it does not mean that they’ll get anything close to that for them, if they sell at all.
Some of the best domains, ones such as HealthcareMarketplace.com were wisely snapped up by investor / developers for less than $5,000.
On the flip side, lesser quality domains, such as OregonExchange.com, which was mentioned in that Fox News article apparently has an asking price of $75,000. That GEO has even less value, and I’m quite certain if these similar quality domains continue to have absurd price tags they will still be owned by the same people five years from now.
Wait, you might be thinking, don’t you most likely own a bunch of health insurance and Obamacare related domains. Well yes, I do in fact, but it doesn’t mean that I want to bring more misinformation into the marketplace and help give people unrealistic expectations about what a parked domain might be worth. Also, I’m developing my domains, building them out, doing something with them other than parking.
The sites and domains that are actually worth something, as in $50,000 and up, those are the developed sites, some with great domains, others not so much. The one thing they all have in common is that there’s something there other than a parked landing page or a price tag. There’s also most often a lot of traffic going to the domain.
Sites like ObamacareFacts.com, a massive site with significant traffic has been producing quality and highly informative content for more than two years. Other sites that are new but on their way, for example HealthCareMarketplace.com in less than three months have gone from parked landing page to well developed site.
Other sites, such as EMD, Obamacare.net have a lot of content and offer a lot of information for the reader. Even the arguably most valuable domain (if it just based on the domain) Obamacare.com is at least making a slight attempt at having some kind of presence. I can say with great confidence that the site would be worth significantly more if it were being regularly updated and a real effort were being made. It hasn’t been updated since May of this year, but it’s still most likely generating a couple hundred dollars a day from type-in traffic and Adsense.
That said, good development always wins out over laziness. Some sites are even teaming up to bring even more unique content and data to consumers. ObamacareFacts.com and FreeObamacareGuide.com actually teamed up and commissioned Survey.com to conduct a national Obamacare Poll with more than three times as many respondents of the Pew Research study. For their efforts and expense they ended up with a very granular and detailed report and as a result it helped the sites obtain even more traffic and national news coverage. This is the kind of development people need to be thinking about doing.
My point, is that the model of just parking your domain, or going out and hand registering as many as you can and then sitting back and waiting for the $50,000 offers to come pouring in, it’s not going to work out for 99.95% of you.
Can you still hand register something, build a site and then actually start making money and then possibly sell for $50,000 or more? Yes, you 100% absolutely can, but you have to put in the time, effort and have realistic expectations. Certainly don’t go buying some $10,000 health insurance related domain thinking that it’s boom time and insurance companies or BankRate or Quinstreet are going to show up at your door with bags of cash, because they’re not.
Be realistic, have reasonable expectations and be willing to put in the time and effort and yes, then you can expect good and even possibly great things to happen.””