Michael Sumner
Domain investor and NameBio CTO, Michael Sumner, developed a nice little game that most domainers should love.
The Domain Game was developed last year for the iOS, and it just made its way to Android!
Finally! 😀
The concept is deceivingly simple: guess the price that a domain was sold for, from four different ranges, three, four, five and six figures USD.
There is a timer counting down, and while right answers are rewarded with 2 points, wrong answers subtract points depending on how far you are from the correct selling price.
For example, if you tapped on the “$XXX” button and the domain was sold for “$xx,xxx” you lose 4 points – 2 points each for every range between your answer and the correct one.
The Domain Game keeps track of your overall score, your ranking among other players, and your current and longest winning streaks.
So what is a good strategy to vastly improve your score, and win The Domain Game rounds – most of the time?
Simply, by leveraging statistics and the characteristics of domains.
Every round provides you with the domain and where it was sold, along with the year of sale.
The data is provided by NameBio, where each answer links to afterwards and the selling venues are primarily the following:
- Private Sale
- TRAFFIC
- Sedo
- Flippa
- NameJet
- GoDaddy
- Buy Domains
- Afternic
- SnapNames
- Uniregistry
- Moniker
Domains fall primarily in the following categories:
- LL, LLL or LLLL .com
- Single word .com
- Two word .com
- Brandables
- Non-English words
- Prefixed with i, e
- Long tail domains
The following general rule of thumb regarding the sales venue will most likely land you the correct answer, by eliminating a number of options:
- Private sales usually go for $XX,XXX to $XXX,XXX
- TRAFFIC sales : More often $XXX,XXX with $XX,XXX as a second option
- Sedo sales : Focus on $X,XXX with $XX,XXX as an option; $XXX is likely
- Flippa sales : Focus on $XXX with $X,XXX possible.
- NameJet sales : More often $X,XXX and $XXX as the second option
- GoDaddy : More often $XXX sales
- Buy Domains : Usually $X,XXX range
- Afternic : Most often $X,XXX with $XX,XXX possible
- SnapNames : Typically $XXX and $X,XXX
- Uniregistry : Many sales in the $XXX,XXX range, and $XX,XXX as a second option
- Moniker : Most often $XXX,XXX sales.
These answers above should be fine-tuned further, depending on the domain category:
- LL sales : $XXX,XXX with no exceptions
- LLL sales : $XX,XXX after 2012, $X,XXX possible for earlier years
- LLLL sales : $XXX before 2012, with $X,XXX possible. NameJet before 2010 almost always $XXX, but Sedo can generate $X,XXX sales.
- Single word sales : Most often $XXX,XXX with $XX,XXX possible
- Two word .com : If at Uniregistry, $XX,XXX is typical but many $XXX,XXX sales
- Brandables : Afternic, Sedo, BuyDomains and Uniregistry can fetch $X,XXX to $XX,XXX. Others, lower.
- Non-English words : Typical Sedo sales, $X,XXX or $XX,XXX.
- Prefixed with i,e : Sales older than 2008 in the $XXX,XXX to $XX,XXX range; newer sales as low as $X,XXX
- Long tail domains : GoDaddy sales at $XXX, Sedo up to $X,XXX
By processing these rules “on the fly” you should be able to increase your score dramatically.
Some other observations about The Domain Game, as we experienced them on Android:
- How fast you tap the correct answer doesn’t seem to reward more points. There should be a remaining time multiplier, giving bonus points to the faster answers.
- You can leave a game open and continue later. It should time out after, say, 24 hours.
- The Domain Game can be made harder by not displaying the sales venue, the year of sale, or both. This way, only the intrinsic value of a domain would be used.
- Sales of seven figure domains, although rare, could further expand the game’s difficulty.
Overall, The Domain Game is a very addictive game related to the domain industry, that domainers will appreciate – and it’s FREE.
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Thanks for the review! You just saved everyone hours of figuring out how to play 🙂
If you want to get super analytical, you’d have to look at the percentages that the venue represents for a given range. Let’s take Sedo for example, only about 7% of their sales are in the five-figure range, compared to about 64% in the four-figure range. So at first glance you’d think that if you see Sedo it’s way more likely to be a four-figure sale.
But I first randomly pick a price range, and then randomly pick a sale within that range, which throws it off. When you consider that Sedo represents a full 1/3 of our five figure sales, when I randomly select the five-figure range there’s a really high chance it will be a Sedo sale. But when I pick the four figure range, they represent a much smaller percentage of all four-figure sales we’ve recorded.
When you balance it all out, there’s almost the same chance that when you see Sedo it was four or five figures, even though they do way, way more four figure sales. Hope I’m explaining that well.
I expect to see you in the Top 10 soon! There’s a new update in the store today that fixes a few bugs, make sure to download it.
Michael – The game is great.
Given that there is only a short timer, one can definitely tap instinctively – although this approach isn’t rewarded by how fast you respond! My analysis reflects my own gameplay system, and I must say I was surprised by some sales. So your “randomization” approach does work well. 😀
Forgot to mention, that VERY few times did I come across the same domain twice.
Thanks, glad you’re having fun with it! I like the idea of getting bonus points for answering quickly, I’ll look into that. Right now the only way to kill a streak is getting an answer wrong, or running out of time. I didn’t want getting a call or taking a break to kill the streak, but if the user leaves the game for a few days it might not be a bad idea to end the streak.
That’s an interesting thought you raise about not showing the venue or date. I think it would make the game borderline impossible 🙂 I’m also not sure domains have intrinsic value. I’ve said it before but if I own a domain, let’s say XYZ.com, and Frank owned the same domain instead, it will be more valuable in his hands because he has the stones/financial position to hold out for more money than I do.
So does XYZ.com even have a set value without regard to where it was sold and who the owner was? I’m not so sure it does. Of course liquid domains can be much more predictable (only if you know the date sold) though if we’re talking wholesale. But the sales in our database are a good mix of wholesale and retail, so not knowing the venue would be crazy hard.
Michael – I actually wrote a primer on how to identify the sales venue from the domain itself 😀 Warped logic?
http://domaingang.com/stories-and-manuals/flippa-sedo-or-godaddy-how-to-identify-which-venue-a-domain-is-listed-on/
You’re correct, some domain investors are capable of achieving higher sales than others, for the same domains. The reason can be connections, or much simpler: they flat out ask for more. The idea is to be able to identify a domain’s value before a price is quoted. Once sold, a domain is gone from one’s portfolio, there are no second opportunities to ask for more.
Hey Michael – You were right, already at #10 position 🙂 You really should implement the timer bonus so that I can be #1. 😛
Found a glitch though. In this screenshot, lifo.com sold for $777 – an answer I guessed wrongly – but NameBio lists it at 5 figures.
So it seems that when a domain is sold several times, a sales figure is picked at random?