Lately I’ve been thinking about selling a few of my domain names. There are a lot of ways to get a good “ballpark” value for your domains but there are also a lot of ways that you can waste your money doing so. For example, there are several appraisal companies who will “professionally” appraise your domain assets and give you a price that you can expect to sell the domain for, or at least an estimate. I have used a few of these and there is only one that I think does the best job and that is Moniker.com. I use Moniker for all of my domain services such as registration, appraisals, selling, etc. They aren’t as well known as GoDaddy but when it comes to customer service, security, and professionalism they are second to none. I have had several domains appraised through them and have found their prices to be dead on so far. In the end though, are appraisals necessarily worth it? There are a few ways to answer that question.


First of all, if you are looking to sell your domains in a professional and largely trafficked or promoted setting such as a live auction or highly popular website, an appraisal can help support your asking price if anybody complains about it. Nothing is ever worth more than somebody is willing to pay if you truly want to sell it. Now what if you are just looking to get an idea before you casually try to market your domain for sale? There are a few sites that I use regularly and would recommend even if you do get your domain professionally appraised.

The first site I would recommend is dnScoop.com. This is an automated but decent appraisal system that calculates your domain’s value based on several factors. It provides a detailed analysis with a price quote for you to read over once you submit your name. It only takes a few seconds and will give you a ballpark value.

Another service that isn’t quite as informative as dnScoop but is also worth checking out is  LeapFish.com. LeapFish does pretty much the same thing as dnScoop but with less details for you to read over in the appraisal results.

In closing, I do think appraisals CAN be worth it. I personally can only recommend Moniker at this time but I’ve heard good things about Sedo’s appraisal service as well. (Sedo is a lot more expensive than Moniker however). The last thing to remember is to never rely on an appraisal value 100%. It’s always good to stop by DnJournal.com as well to look at recent sales values for domains similar to what you own. That will show you what other people were able to get for their domains and it can be a very powerful resource.