I will start off by admitting I am biased because Louise and Troy of Protrada and Morgan Linton are friends. That doesn’t discount the great things both are doing. Protrada is putting in a ton of effort and money into creating a platform that will help a domain investor monetize and build their portfolio. Morgan is working every day to figure out how to make more money in this industry. They are both getting it right with their new products Appraiso.com and DevName.com
Appraiso.com
Appraiso is very simple. It’s a website valuator. It takes key stats of your website and uses their algorithm and returns a value. A value that allows you to have one more opinion of the worth of your site. In addition to that metric it also throws in an estibot domain name evaluation for you as well. Between the two you have a pretty good benchmark to start your sales negotiation.
Is this science? No. Is it the end all, be all for you to set the price of your domain? No. Its like any valuation site in that it gives you a gauge to your site’s value. You’ll have to take it from there. Knowing Morgan and his ability his ability to work with others, there’s no doubt in my mind that you’ll soon be seeing Appraiso incorporated into other domain tools and platforms. I also know that this thing will evolve. Like everything new, there are going to be a need for improvement and just in beta testing I saw that the support is there. But what will keep me using it is the simplicity. Appraiso is straight forward, clean, simple, and fast. All the info and results are in a tight little box. It even gives warnings if my numbers appear to be off ie revenue unusually high considering traffic, market category, or backlinks. Watch for that thing to go off for half of the sites for sale at Flippa.
DevName is the newest product from Winged Media and it can be used independent or within the Protrada system. It’s trying to answer that everyone has tried and that’s “Is there something between parking and full development?” I spoke with Louise and Troy at DomainFest about DevName and got to see a few examples, I have to admit I was impressed. I had tried minisite development before and with little to no success and all I ended up with was deindexed domains. If you look at these examples you’ll see they are deliver much more than we’ve seen from others in the past. They are combining articles, videos, question and answer, ratings, amazon, and adsense all into their site. In my opinion they look and feel more real than past quick sites I’ve paid for. Its certainly no where near what you could do if you built out a site yourself, but for the price and ability to get up hundreds of sites quickly, this seems like a great new option. I’m also hoping that I will be able to use Amazon again. Illinois was kicked out of Amazon and perhaps using a third party will allow me back in. And the most important part of DevName. 100% of the revenue feeds go to the owner. I’ll be putting 25 names on the system and I’ll follow up on the results.
Yes, let us know how DevName.com works.
I lean towards thinking it is more of the same.
Why would this work better than Epik or DevHub.com? They use the same nameservers for all the sites, right?
That pretty much means …. dead in the water if you don’t get a unique IP for each domain.
I looked into developing out some sites with a 3rd party software that used Amazon Affiliates. Was told no can do by Amazon cause of Illinois. Will be curious to see if can do with this. $20 for site for a set of domains in a vertical is a good price, especially if the site generates one more than that over a year. Definitely a better option then parking of late i imagine.
It’s $20 per domain John, not for a set of domains in a vertical. Where did you see that?
Also, they say they do lead gen, but give no examples.
I can’t see how they think they will get anywhere with the same ol’ tired approach.
What is new about them? I don’t understand.
I have to admit that it irks me that these companies keep pushing these solutions on everyone as if it is some new, fresh idea. It was not fresh even in 2007 since anyone that knew anything about Epik or DevHub.com knew those domains would get knocked way down deep in the G index, if not kicked out altogether.
Interesting Epik and DevHub are still around but nobody talks even a peep about them anymore.
Waste of time unless there is something I am not seeing.
I really wish there was a solution here, the market could use it.
What I meant in the last post about Epik and DevHub was that they would get knocked down because they are using the same IP addresses for multiple domains….. a huge development no-no if you want to develop right.
@ Mike
Yes. $20 a domain. I don’t think its bad if it delivers something new compared to parked sites. But, i hear you on the comments as well as what many others are saying on other blogs. I just saw at Morgans site he is going to be doing a trail of this vs Epik for 3-6 months to see how to works etc.
Shane,
Awesome post! Morgan Linton is a true leader in the domain industry. I have worked with him on a variety of projects and can’t speak highly enough of Morgan. I can’t wait to try Appraiso for myself. I think his tool has a really cool name and I know amazing technology to back it up. Can’t wait to see how much my websites are worth (I hope a lot). Great job covering these new products and a huge congrats to my good friend, Morgan Linton!
All the best,
Ian
Have you guys looked at these sites, I can pay a guy in India $5 an hour to make me a better site than this, they look tacky, and choppy.
You are not going to make your $20 back, if you have a decent domain you already know what to do. Epik is greedy taking 50% of revenue, plus development fees. These guys get points for being fair on pricing, but most parking programs are putting out similar names. These guys could be putting their talents to so many better things, chasing domainers, no money there…
I did find a pretty cool software program that let one run as many sites as possible using Amazon Affiliates and are eventually adding Commission Junction and others, but got the nix from Amazon on setting up an account.
Good post Shane
Nice work by Morgan and his team on Appraiso. However, I’m not sure why the DevName sites would perform any better than Epik sites or any other mass development platforms.
Adam, my domains were deindexed at Epik. I figure not getting deindexed would be a great start.
The solution to de-indexing is put original, fresh content – TEXT – near the top of the site, and not have it too code-heavy. Google even announced it would take into consideration “above-the-fold” advertising in its quality scroe of the site, meaning, near the top of the page. Google wants to see content, which means original text.
I Googled some of the text on the sample page, and see it is duplicate:\
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=&q=%22Before+you+plan+your+next+camping+trip%2C+pick+out+a+few+campfire+cooking%22&oq=%22Before+you+plan+your+next+camping+trip%2C+pick+out+a+few+campfire+cooking
Google knows. It knows. Write your own stuff.