I was over at Sedo.com and noticed two similar domain names listed in the Top Domains section. Payment.com and Payments.com . The interesting thing to me, was the $100K difference in the sellers suggested offering price.
- Payment.com $350,000
- Payments.com $250,000
I looked a bit further into both domain names and here are some stats according to Sedo, Estibot, Whois and Compete.com .
Visits to Sedo listing page for each domain:
Payment.com has had 954 visits to it’s sedo listing page.
Payments.com has had 925 visits to it’s sedo listing page.
Visits to the domain name directly (traffic) since the domains are parked using sedo.
Payment.com has had 3,519 visits the past 31 days
Payments.com has had 805 visits the past 31 days
According to sedo, monthly Google searches for the matching term:
Payment.com payment is searched on average 5 million times monthly.
Payments.com payments is searched on average 1.5 million times monthly.
Estibot.com domain valuation tool suggests:
Payment.com estimated value is $200,000 USD
Payments.com estimated value is $120,000 USD
Compete.com estimates traffic as:
Payment.com 1,530 unique visits per month
Payments.com 708 unique visits per month
With the above stats, the price difference seems to be justified by the numbers with "Payment" having the upper hand to the plural version. If you also consider the singular version is a "better" domain for branding, this also makes sense it would be higher priced.
Payment.com was registered in 1998 and Payments.com was registered in 1999.
I do think Both domain names should be purchased by the same buyer for a security blanket, plus the fact that it’s not all that often with premium generics to have Both domains for sale and not be used already.
Payment.com is a Great branding tool for an online payment processing company, with Payments.com making just as much sense! The question is for the buyer.. is $600,000 the correct price to pay for a brand like Payment.com? Is the $600K worth the investment for the 2,238-4,324 estimated monthly traffic?
If you were to look at "buying that kind of traffic" average CPC (cost per click advertising) for the terms.. payment would cost about $4.75 per click with payments at $4.45.
2,238 x’s $4.75 =’s $10,630 per month x’s 12 = $127,566
4,324 x’s $4.75 =’s $20,539 per month x’s 12 = $246,468
At that rate, you would be paying approx 2.5 years of advertising costs at the higher end of traffic estimates for the domain and your investment would be met and the remaining time owning the domains would be pretty much Free! Let alone, you can Resell the domains at anytime you wish for likely near or more then your investment in purchasing the domains!
One thing is for sure…. plural or singluar domain names can make a bid difference in several ways! Traffic, Searches, Branding, Value, CPC and more. If and when you have the chance to own both, it is a wise choice. Payment.com and Payments.com are some very nice domain names!
Michael Castello
When I started registering names in 1994-1995 I always went for the singular since it was more of a brand. Most brands are singular like Apple.com so I registered Banana.com and others with that in mind. Now if I were a toy company, Toys.com is much preferred and you had better be selling toys. Toy.com can be both for selling toys and also to sell one particular thing. Toy.com could be a person, and adult site, or any new invention. Toys.com can not because it is general in its understanding and what you audience would expect. I believe many buyers are looking for a popular brand that is already “bought” in people’s minds that has a trust factor built in.
If I were developing Payment or Payments.com they both offer differing scenarios. Payments.com would limit in the fact that most people would expect a payment system or gateway. Buy, Payment.com can be much more.
You bring up a lot of issues that we deal with everyday even in SEO. I tend to place singular words in our Meta tags because payment is already in a search of the word payments. Payments.com is not in a search for the word payment. Many may not think that matters but we do.
Your post is smack on. I wish I had registered the plural when they were free or of little cost but I never had the thought of protecting the names. I was more content on building what I already had and 15 years later my brother and I are still developing them out. To be honest there is a lot of room for others to create something for the internet so why not let others have a shot.
Payment.com and Payments.com could be two completely different businesses that do not compete. Why just shelve a great name when someone else could use it. If there is no intent to develop a name, then sell it or partner it with someone with some great ideas.
Jamie Zoch
@Michael,
Thank you for the tips and your insights. I often use plural terms in meta, but it does make sense with what you said. If you do not mind sharing, I noticed for Daycare.com, you repeat daycare 3 times at the start and then end meta with day care repeated 3 times.
theoretical
I try not to hold to a hard and fast rule, but when both are available it’s certainly a bonus. There are some plural forms that are the accepted term, in many cases the singular is more frequently searched. In some cases owning an abbreviation (say of Ft. Wayne versus Fort Wayne) is nice protection, too. I think I own three or four variations of St. Petersburg
Over 90% of the cases though, I own a single name for the keyword(s) in question.
I rarely value these prime keywords based on their type in traffic though exact match queries plays a big factor. I find it interesting that the exact match queries for payment and payments are both incredibly small, which partially explains why the type ins are fairly low for these two domains, too. If you were valuing just on exact match queries though, onlinepayment.com would be worth 10 times as much as payment.com, so that’s clearly not the only factor either.
The real value in these two domains is in their automatic trust and authority that will assist in converting a visitor to a paying user, in getting merchants to accept payments, in getting marketplaces to buy in… and in that regard I don’t see a 40% difference in price. The trust that either one would have is fairly comparable in my opinion (in this case anyway), so payments.com may be a better deal even with less than half of the searches and with a quarter of the existing visitors… even though I personally like payment.com more if money was not an object. Either way, its hard to go wrong at those prices. Unfortunately I left my quarter mil in my other jacket.
Leonard Britt
Don’t forget that the default avg CPC is not what most advertisers will actually pay. Quality score will influence the CPC for any particular ad but in theory if the bidder is willing to pay a max CPC of $0.60 they can still obtain a page one position and pay an average CPC of under $0.45 per Adwords’ Keyword Tool. And the result is that despite the traffic, that pricetag is no bargain. Of course CPC could increase in the future but type-in traffic could decline. I’ve seen traffic for some minisites where the user types into Google wwww.keyword1keyword2 with or without .com and my alternative extension site appeared on page one as a result.
Michael Castello
Jamie,
I made most of daycare.com Meta tags over seven years ago. It rated #1 for the search term daycare in Yahoo, MSN and Google. There was no particular reason for repeating daycare 3 times at the start and at the end. It ranks well and I leave it alone. Wish there were logic to it but there is not. ;>
Sathees
In my view, they both are great names. Due to the current economic melt down, it may be difficult to sell them at a higher price o even at the price mentioned. But holding them for another 5 years will fetch double or triple of that price tag. Singular and plural is a very interesting thing and got to be very very clear about it.
This was a nice article!