Loogic English

Recently, Jésus Alonso made an important argument at Iniciador regarding the use of premium .com domains for web projects because of the potential branding implications and the ease of remembering the name for users. Antonio Andujar, who just bought Teatros.com, was also at this talk and surely has taken a good look on how Jesus Alonso is developing his Restaurantes.com project.

These are not the only premium domains that are being used or soon going to be used as brands for new projects. For example, look at the purchase of Bodas.com by Amado Martin or the launch of Coches.com, and others will surely soon follow. It seems that prices of some of these domains are starting to drop and the domain owners that were parking before are seeing that they can achieve better profitability by actually building something out of them.

Now seems to be a good time to look for premium domains at prices that were unlikely to be realized by entrepreneurs before. You can even find bargains like Mundiales.com that was bought for a little more than $5,000. But how do we find out about these types of bargains? It seems that the professionals in this sector will find such opportunities more easily but for people like myself, with little experience, resources like Sedo or Demene are useful to look for such opportunies.

Today we came to know that the sales of cars in January of this year have fallen by 41.6% to 59.385 units, the lowest level since 1996. Without doubt, the automobile sector is going through a critical period, in line with the real estate sector. Reducing costs and improving the effectiveness of the advertising campaigns are now a priority for companies in these sectors. On the internet, perhaps they have the best option for both the things, the advertising on the internet is cheaper and can be more focuse to reach the target public. I can personally confirm this situation for the case of two clients from these sectors with whom we are going to start working.

In this line, comes a new portal developed for one of the most important domain names in Spanish, Coches.com, which was a property of Chris Chena and now belongs to the company Autodescuento. According to Carlos Blanco, the domain might have been sold for somewhere between 800 and 900.000 euros.
We talked of Autodescuento when we came to know of the investment by Marek Fodor and now we can see that this company is betting everything on this sector, with the idea that a chunk of the business of selling cars will migrate to the internet. Concesionarios.com and Financiatucoche.com are the other two websites of this company that we hope to pay more attention to from now on.

With respect to Coches.com, I think that it has a very good focus. Above all, I liked the search engine and the page that shows results with the filter system, and it has given me some interesting ideas for a project that we are developing.

Yago Arbeola (CEO of Sync) releases this information in his blog and from the comments of important domainers and businessmen such as Eneko Knorr, Axel Serena or Carlos Blanco, it seems the idea has been well received.

Juan Pablo Sueiro amplifies the idea and many doubts and questions spring up in my mind.

It is clear that the idea of creating an investment fund in premium domain names is very interesting and could be a huge success as a business, but due to legal issues I’m not sure if it is feasible. If it has to do with a big number of investors contributing money to a fund for the purchase of domain names, it has to be controlled in some way by some competent authority, or it could have important legal problems.

To do it legally, would it be necessary to create an investment fund like the banks do? Would it be necessary to create a SICAV (controlling entity of institutions of collective investment)? Is it possible to do it simply with an SA (public limited company)?

I suppose that if the investors throw in a good amount of money to start with, all these issues can be settled hiring experts in the field, but for people (like me) who don’t dominate these things, it could be an important obstacle