Bronte Media

First a brief introduction:

• In November of last year, I registered 100 real estate-related domains that I found by looking into Census data and growth in smaller US cities.
• People showed up, but the solutions from parking companies Trafficz and Sedo were yielding roughly $5 RPM.
• So I changed strategy, hosted the domains locally and created a new template with affiliate links I previously had.
• Around 362 people showed up in June and roughly 183 clicked on one of the links. Some on links that I get paid on a CPC and some on a CPA.

With the domains up for renewal on November 2nd, I decided to go into Google analytics and see which domains were generating the most traffic. Not surprisingly, 25 domains of the 101 were accounting for around 90% of the traffic.

So I made the decision to keep the 25 and will let the rest lapse. This now gives me a happy feeling of profitability. Traffic is down from June. There are roughly 250-300 people a month going to the domains. And the click through rate of 50% is holding. So just say 125 clicks. With the blend of CPA and CPC clicks, the value is roughly 15c a click say. So that is $18.75 a month in revenue. The domains cost around $13.37 per month to register.

Absolutely fuck all in the scheme of things but for an experiment, it’s worked out quite well. I can now sit on the domains for a long time profitably and maybe someone will try to buy one of the domains (no one has inquired in the past year).

Valuing my time at $0, the experiment cost roughly $700 for the domains, $100 for the programmer to hack together an intepreter that ran the name possibilities through a whois service and update my spreadsheet, and one freebie design from my regular designer for the new template. That was offset by roughly $100 in revenue. So if we assume the upfront investment is $700, and that the domains are ‘profitable’ now, then I am sitting on a rough 9% annuity ($60 profit / $700 ‘investment’) if nothing happens further. Of course the traffic is likely to either keep growing steadily or be banished from Google’s indexes and people will stop typing in domain names.

Either way, this is likely the conclusion post in this series. I might do a one year ‘how did it go in 2009′ post but I hope you enjoyed the experiment as much as I did.

For the curious among you, here are the list of domains I ended up with:

Anadarko Real Estate
Beardstown Real Estate
Big Stone Gap Real Estate
Brewton Real Estate
Carrizo Springs Real Estate
Caruthersville Real Estate
Centerton Real Estate
Dequeen Real Estate
Dormont Real Estate
Duquoin Real Estate
Euharlee Real Estate
Everman Real Estate
Gun Barrel City Real Estate
Hoopeston Real Estate
Laferia Real Estate
Manorhaven Real Estate
Meadows Place Real Estate
Moosic Real Estate
Morgans Point Resort Real Estate
New Martinsville Real Estate
Pahokee Real Estate
Stewartville Real Estate
Wadesboro RealEstate
Washington Court House Real Estate
Watonga Real Estate
Winterset Real Estate