What is my domain worth? A method you can apply yourself

A domain is worth what a specific buyer will pay for it on a specific day. There is no book value, no ticker, no clearing price. But that does not make valuation guesswork. You can build a defensible range in an afternoon using four inputs: comparable sales, a short list of adjustment factors, the buyer's business case, and a liquidity discount that reflects how long you are prepared to wait.

Before you start, accept the unglamorous baseline. The large majority of registered domains are worth the renewal fee and nothing more. Length, an odd extension, hyphens, numbers, a made-up word nobody is searching for — any one of these can pin a name at wholesale. Running the method below and concluding "this is a £200 name" is a successful outcome. It saves you two years of holding out for £20,000 that was never coming.

Step one: find comparable sales, then read them properly

Comps are the foundation. Public sales databases such as NameBio record reported transactions with price, date and venue. Marketplace listings tell you what sellers are asking, which is a different and weaker signal.

Search for comps along three axes:

• Same keyword. If you hold a name containing "ledger", find every reported sale containing "ledger". This tells you whether the word itself carries commercial weight.
• Same pattern. Two-word .com, dictionary word .com, four-letter pronounceable, industry plus "ly". Patterns price more consistently than individual words.
• Same buyer type. A name that only a funded startup would buy behaves differently from one every plumber in the country might want.

Now read the comps sceptically. Three questions:

How old is it? A 2015 sale is history, not evidence. Weight the last 24–36 months heavily.

Where did it sell? An expiry auction price is a wholesale price paid by a reseller who intends to mark it up. A brokered end-user sale is a retail price. The gap between the two is routinely 5–20x for the same class of name. Do not mix them in one average.

Was it a lease or instalment deal? Reported totals sometimes represent a payment plan spread over years. That is worth less than the same figure in cash today.

Collect eight to fifteen genuine comps. Discard the top and bottom outliers. What remains is your starting band — and it will usually be wide, something like £3,000 to £25,000. That is normal. The next steps narrow it.

Step two: adjust for the things that actually move price

Work through these in order. Each one shifts you up or down within your comp band.

Extension. The .com is still the default and prices accordingly. A strong .co, .io or .ai can command real money in the right sector, but for the identical string most alternative extensions trade at a meaningful discount to .com — often a small fraction of it. Country extensions price against their local market, not the global one: a .co.uk is valued by British buyers.

Length and syllables. Shorter is better, but pronounceability beats raw character count. A seven-letter name someone can say down the phone without spelling it out is worth more than a five-letter jumble.

Commercial intent of the words. "Insurance", "loans", "clinic" and "software" attach to industries with high customer value. "Sunset", "willow" and "pebble" are pretty but generic. A word's value tracks the profit per customer in the industry it serves.

Friction. Every hyphen, digit, doubled letter or ambiguous spelling cuts value. Hyphens are the harshest — often a 70–90% discount against the clean equivalent.

Brandability versus exact match. Two different buyers. Exact-match keyword names sell on search and category authority. Invented brandables sell on availability, trademark headroom and how well they scale. Decide which you own and comp accordingly, because the buyer pools barely overlap.

Encumbrances. If the string maps onto someone else's registered trademark, your buyer pool collapses to that one company, and they may prefer a legal route to a cheque. This can reduce a name's practical value to near zero.

Step three: test it against a buyer's business case

Comps tell you what the market has paid. The business case tells you what the price will feel like to the person writing the cheque. Comps set the range; this step tells you where in the range to sit.

Ask: who realistically buys this, and what does it do for them?

• Who are the three most likely buyers? If you cannot name three, your pool is thin and your price should reflect that.
• What is their annual revenue? A domain price that would be trivial for a Series B company is impossible for a two-person agency. Businesses tend to treat a domain as a brand capital expense sized against a year of marketing spend, not against a hosting bill.
• What is the alternative? If a decent variant is available to register for £12, your leverage is limited. If every sensible alternative is taken and your name is the last clean option in the category, it goes up.
• What is the cost of being wrong? A buyer already trading under the name, or one who has printed packaging, has far more to lose by walking away.

This step is why the same name can sell for £4,000 to a freelancer and £40,000 to a funded company. You are not pricing the string; you are pricing the fit.

Step four: convert to a range, then set your floor

Produce three numbers, not one.

Retail ask. The top of your adjusted band. This is what you list at, and it assumes you will wait for the right buyer — which may mean years. Most premium names get few serious enquiries a year, so patience is the entire strategy.

Realistic settlement. Typically 60–80% of the ask on a negotiated sale. If that number still pleases you, your ask is sound. If it does not, your ask is too low.

Walk-away floor. The wholesale price — what another investor would pay you today. Often 10–25% of retail. Know it before you enter a negotiation, and never let a buyer discover it.

Then apply a liquidity discount. Money now is worth more than a hypothetical larger sum later. If holding for three more years costs you renewals and attention, and the retail buyer may never appear, a fast offer at 50% can be the better decision. That is a judgement about your own circumstances, not about the name.

What automated appraisals are actually good for

Algorithmic valuations parse length, extension, keyword frequency and past sales. They are useful for two things: triaging a large portfolio quickly, and flagging names you have overrated. They are poor at the thing that determines price — whether a real buyer with real budget wants this specific name this year.

Treat an automated figure as one comp among many. If it lands inside the range you built by hand, that is mild confirmation. If it is wildly outside, check whether you have missed something, then trust your own work.

How the sale mechanics affect your number

Price is what you agree; proceeds are what you keep. Two things to build in.

Commission. On Names.com, sellers pay 15% on a completed sale and nothing otherwise; buyers pay no fee. Set your floor on the net figure, not the headline.

Transfer risk. Buyers discount for uncertainty. When a transaction runs through escrow — neither side paying or transferring first — that discount largely disappears, because the buyer is no longer pricing in the chance of losing their money. Selling through a marketplace that handles this is worth more than the commission it costs.

One last discipline: write your valuation down with the comps that produced it. When an offer arrives at a third of your ask, you will want the reasoning in front of you rather than in your memory.