I contacted somebody today about buying their domain name and got a reply that I have yet to hear in my years of domaining. That doesn’t happen that often, so I thought I would write about it a little.

The domain I contacted the person about is no longer a "site" but the owner surely felt that they should be able to get the amount of money spent over the years by adding all that to the value of the domain name!

The problem is, all the money spent on web design, hosting fees,  content, time, pictures and even some of the promoting doesn’t get attached to a domain name value unless the domain and site (files) are sold together and is current! If the site is current, it should also have traffic, indexed pages in SE’s and I can understand adding some "past costs" into the sale but not if your just getting the domain.

Depending on how the site was advertised will likely Not Matter either for just the domain.

The only time advertising pays off for a domain, is if Links were put in place on other sites, bookmarks etc but keep in mind these can be gone just as fast as they were added. Indexed pages is about the same as the links. They are held in search engines which should still result in traffic, but without content on the site, they will likely go away pretty quick.

So if you want to be able to "include" all these past expenses, you shouldn’t be just selling the domain name. It should be a site/domain sale. In order to do this, the site is going to have to be current OR the $$$’s anybody is going to pay will be much lower then what you paid for all of it!

If you hold an "older" domain name, I can understand including in the registration fees paid over the years but Not any past hosting bills, site design or advertising costs.

If it’s a popular site, nice domain etc. clearly then it’s a whole different story.