Here’s a list of names I tried to sell on Ebay and the results.

DIDN”T SELL

1yj.net One Yankee Juliet NLL 3 Character Domain Name $9.99
5jd.net Five Juliet Delta NLL 3 Character Domain Name $9.99
These aren’t something I’d normally be attracted to, but when I found a handful of these in The Drop one day I decided to try to flip them. A couple did, these didn’t. Typically, I did more research later on and found that these NLL.nets are considered worth Reg fee only.
From 3character.com
LLN com $220 net $10
LNL com $220 net $reg fee
NLL com $220 net $reg fee
NNL com $220 net $reg fee
NLN com $220 net $10

ENGILBERT.COM First Name Domain Name Baby Boy? $24.99
I see these name domains available in The Drop and I think End User! I’m sure there’s an Engilbert out there somewhere who would love to have his first name domain name. I didn’t find him on Ebay though.
LUBARS.COM Domain Name $9.99
NEVESS.COM Domain Name $9.99
A couple of surname domain names. “nevess” scores 175,000 in a Google search and is also Hungarian for ‘renowned’. “lubars” scores 434,000 in a Google search. I’d have to assume there weren’t any Lubars or Nevess family members in the market for domains on Ebay that week.

[Updated 030809]
RFUK.NET Semi-Premium LLLL.Net $9.99 sold $.99
BMBY.NET Semi-Premium LLLL.Net $9.99 sold $.99
COKX.NET Pronouncable Semi-Premium LLLL.Net $9.99 sold $.99
GUCS.NET Pronouncable Semi-Premium LLLL.Net $9.99 sold $.99
GEWL.NET Pronouncable Semi-Premium LLLL.Net $9.99 sold $1.25
JLOC.NET Pronouncable Semi-Premium LLLL.Net $9.99 sold $.99
JROE.NET Common Initial/Last Name Combo LLLL.Net $9.99 sold $.99
EXLA.NET Pronouncable LLLL.Net $9.99 sold $1.25
TKUN.NET Semi-Premium LLLL.Net $9.99 sold $.99
OMBJ.NET Semi-Premium LLLL.Net $9.99 sold $.99
RIUV.NET Pronouncable LLLL.Net $9.99 sold $.99
BFWM.NET Semi-Premium LLLL.Net $9.99 sold $.99
UTTP.NET Semi-Premium LLLL.Net $9.99 sold $.99
MOAU.NET Semi-Premium LLLL.Net $9.99 sold $1.29
ROWG.NET Semi-Premium LLLL.Net $9.99 sold $1.25
Oh boy. This was clearly a mistake. Inspired by what I’d been reading on DropDude.com, I picked these up in The Drop thinking they’d filp for at least a few dollars profit. Kind of silly to discover, after the fact, they weren’t the sort of .nets domainers are buying, i.e. Premium.
From 4letternoob (soon to be LLLL.com)
In general, the best performing letters are: A, S, E, M, D, I, T, O. Other strong letters include F, G, H.
The letters J,K,Q,U,V,W,X,Y,Z are referred as non-premium letters. The presence of one of these letters considerably devalues a 4 letter .com under most circumstances. Of these, Q, X, Z are the weakest.
premium letters A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, T
medium: J, K, U, V, W
most hated: QXYZ

ShaggyDogBlog.com Domain Name – Great For Joke Site $24.99
This was one of mine that was up for renewal. Probably I’ve had it long enough that I’ve just become attached to it but I could say that for a lot of domains and so I decided to let it go. But not for less than $24.95. Like I said, I like this one anyway.

AmateurPom.com Click-Alike Domain Name $24.99
AutolnsuranceOnline.com Click-Alike Domain Name $24.99
AffordableHealthlnsurance.com Click-Alike Domain Name $24.99
Part of my Click-Alike collection. I fell for these types of names about a year ago after reading a blog post on DomainTools I imagined a network of Click-Alike sites full of high dollar Affiliate products. When the renewals came up recently I decided I’d see if anyone else thought they were valuable. Hmm.

DID SELL

StormTrooperEffect.com $.99
StormTrooperSyndrome.com $.99
Before I was even a Noob I was getting excited about names like these. Rather than let them expire I put them on Ebay. The other thing about a sale, even a $.99 sale, is that you end up with positive feedback. You need 20 sales to open an Ebay store, which was something I was considering.

BUNX.NET Pronouncable LLLL.Net $9.99
GOYZ.NET Pronouncable LLLL.Net $9.99
PULV.NET Pronouncable Semi-Premium LLLL.Net $9.99
A couple of the ‘Semi-Premiums’ sold!
4cq.net Four Charlie Quebec NLL 3 Character Domain Name $9.99
4ql.net Four Quebec Lima NLL 3 Character Domain Name $9.99

OddioBook.com Brandable Domain Name – Odd Audio Books! $0.99
RikiTikiWiki..com Domain Name Att. Mongoose Lovers $0.99
A couple more of my pre-Noob acquisitions. Sold them rather than let them expire.

Dalores.com First Name Domain Name Baby Girl? $24.99
This was a name I found in The Drop. Buyer got a great deal IMO.

Looking at only the domains I purchased off The Drop for the purpose of flipping…
Acquired for Ebay flipping: 25 @ $7.69 = $192.25
Ebay selling costs: $27.34
Total cost: $219.59
Total sales: $80.93
Cost of experiment: $138.66

I suppose that could change. I still have the domains for sale.
Another thing I should mention was that in the process of looking for flipable domains I found a couple I think were keepers that are now parked and for sale at Sedo. I could be wrong, but they seem to me worth at least a couple of hundred each, and I wouldn’t have found them if I hadn’t been in Drop-Flip acquisition mode. (But what do you think?)
Pussied.com
and
Hobbying.com

What’s my take-away?
I think people shopping for domains on Ebay are looking for steals.
I think that at these prices, the Ebay charges really do impact your profits.
I think that unless you just love to do it, (or get really lucky) the number of hours spent scanning the drop lists, acquiring names, listing names for sale, and following up on the sale (getting the domain transferred) makes the whole process a big time-waster! Even if you got good at it, it’s not going to scale. It’s got ‘Don’t quit your day job’ written all over it.
Sour grapes?

P.S. Great post from Joshua Hunt-Smith on the How-To nitty gritty details of  putting a domain up for sale on Ebay at LLLL.com.

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If you’re an OCD domainer (OCDomainer.com available as of 10/17/08) the ‘Drop’ is very likely to become a ritual you feel compelled to perform daily. Ask me how I know. The Drop has all the ingredients necessary to inspire a full-blown obsession. It’s seductive. There’s the mystery–information is a little hard to come by. It’s full of possibility–”With my special knowledge around the topic of (DNA Gene Sequencing, Farley Torque Sprockets, Gaspers) I might discover the Dropping Gem that will catapult me into the sphere of Elite Domainers! (You picture yourself shaking Frank’s hand). Maybe you stumble upon a story of catching an expired name, like this one, (It’s a little dated, add NameJet.com to the list of back-ordering services, but still the best overview I’ve come across). Or maybe you stumble upon a site like DropDude.com or GoDrops.com – a lot of action going on here with The Drop. It could be a forum post, where you read someone nonchalantly boasting about catching ‘spareparts.com’ in The Drop for Reg. fee. “Maybe I should look into this!”.

So you start collecting details and one day you hit a goldmine of drop information like these posts from DotWeekly.com:
Domain Name Drop Times and Partner Domains, and Tips for using Redrops.com. Inspiration! Maybe this ‘insider seeming’ info will help open the gates to Domain Riches!

However you come to it, sooner or later you end up with a very long list of deleting domains on your screen. A VERY long list.

And one morning around 11am PDT you start loading your names into GoDaddy’s bulk checker 500 at a time. Harvesting the Availables you scan them for desirability. Whew! What a load of junk! Who would have registered this crap in the first place? No wonder they’re dropping. Wait, what’s that? NewportBeachPizzas.com? Hmm… would this be a good candidate for my ‘Geo Portfolio’? Let’s Reg it! Oops, gone already.

A couple of days (weeks, months) of this and you’re thinking, “There’s got to be a better way. Maybe I should look for the names I want first and only try to catch those!” So begins the search for a method to massage that list into something useful, hopefully valuable.

You get lucky and the first site you find is one of the best, LazyMate.com. Or you mess around with spreadsheets and bang your head against Excel’s raw ugliness. Maybe you have a favorite text editor that lets you search using Grep. Finally, poking around in tomorrow’s list you discover a couple of domains anybody would want. And a few dozen more that you’d have to think twice about.

Round 2. 11am PDT. GoDaddy bulk checker at the ready. And they’re off! Over the next hour you plug your list into the checker over and over waiting/hoping one of the names you covet will become available long enough for you to register it. But, unless you’re looking for some pretty obscure stuff, you don’t. Somebody else gets them. “Who’s getting these great names? It’s like Free Money falling from the sky.” Who indeed!

Inside a Drop Catcher’s War Room Command Post! War Room! Quite a bit of competition for these dropping names (and that was written in 2004). I guess I’m a little behind the curve. The Big Boys have Armies of Servers at their disposal. So what are they leaving on the table?

This takes you to the next tier of The Drop– Back-Ordering companies, who for a fee, will use their army of servers to try and grab the domain you want as it drops. They’re in competition against each other, so if you want that name you’ll register it at all of them, or at least the big three: SnapNames, NameJet, and Pool. If you’re the only bidder and your back order gets won, congratulations, you become the new owner of the domain. But if more than one person had the domain on back-order then the domain enters into auction and you may well find yourself bidding against some very deep pockets. I got lucky a few times–grabbed a domain that wasn’t on anyone else’s radar for $60. Spent more money than I wanted to a couple of times– $400 I couldn’t afford for a development domain I still have parked a year later. And got blown out of the bidding immediately a few times where a domain I thought might be under the radar had been spotted by a dozen deep-pocket domainers who bid it way out of my league.

But with so many domains dropping daily there MUST be great names falling between the cracks, so what else are the ‘little guys’ doing with The Drop?

Aha! There are scripts and an API! And DomainResearchTool (alas, PC only)– Scan large lists looking for expired domains with traffic! You can run your own version of the War Room! No more manual GoDaddy submissions. DropDude offers the Dynadot Drop Catcher. (Also check out Jason’s article on his business model, The Flip). See how it’s done live with other domainers at GoDrop’s Live Chat and Drop. I also signed up for the daily list of best-of-available-drops emailed 3 times a week from DailyDomainDrop.com.

So what are these guys catching? Good stuff? Well… I guess it depends on how you measure the results, right? If you measure it by ROI, then Jason at DropDude, using his self-hosted script method, scoring mostly Premium LLLL.nets, is probably doing pretty good. He seems to be making about 200% on an $8 name, i.e. flipping it for $20-30 without too much trouble. The other guys I mention seem to be more about building inventory than flipping. Domain inventory might turn out to have some value. Or it might not.

Here’s a short list of the kind of domains people are catching off The Drop themselves with their various methods.

DropDude
“The 4 I grabbed were, elnt.net, lghg.net, rgfc.net and thcb.net.”
“I got lucky today, picked up 8 quad premium llll.net domain names. I am already looking to unload them at my standard $9 price tag. These small sales are what helps me fund other projects like the one I started yesterday.”
“I grabbed dumpsterdivers.net yesterday and have already started it on it’s way to a money making mini-site.”

GoDrops (See also: GoDrops Grabs)
babyheadstart.com, fasthandyman.com, excellentringtones.com, 17452.com, d-w-a.net, publicsurf.com
17164.com, 30997.com, tintwindow.com, 5051.net, geobabes.com, beerscore.com, f-d-a.net, humboo.com

DailyDomainDrops (List published as available drops).
DialogueBlog.com, GeoPatrol.com, HiTechAnalyst.com, LiveSeeker.com, MemberCam.com
SatelliteEye.com, ScottsdaleEstatePlanning.com, SoCalNights.com, IsraelAccommodations.com
BritainAccommodations.com, GreatBritainAccommodations.com, GreenerClothes.com
GreenRecreation.com, YourAnchorage.com, YourProvidence.com, YourSaltLakeCity.com

And on and on.
Now, I didn’t call my blog DomainNoob for nothing. Frankly I’m not making ANY money domaining (apart from a tiny bit of Parked PPC) so what do I know? But personally, I’m sort of baffled by a lot of the attention paid to these long-tail double keyword domains, and also the whole LLLL phenomenon. I don’t really get this part of the market. I look at the auction lists and understand why those names are going for big bucks. I subscribe to Rick Latona‘s Daily Domains Newsletter, and the prices for those domains make sense. It’s just this short end of the marketplace that I’m not making any sense of.
And if these are the kinds of domains I’m going to find left over between the cracks after combing through deleting domain lists until my eyes bleed I have to ask myself–Is it really worth the trouble?
What do you think?