News

Domain Developers Fund Investors Report – February 2013

The market in 2013
The year starts with many remarkable sales, or at least with remarkable reported sales (an increasing number of sales are now under NDA). First estate.com, a domain financed by DDF was sold for 165.000 USD. Other remarkable sales have been: Booker.com: 375.000 USD, Mojo.com: 300.000 USD, Apuestas.com (“best” in Spanish) at 220.000 USD, Mobile.xxx: 160.000 USD, Partners.com: 125.000 USD, Torrents.com: 112.000 USD, Banque.com: 91.000 USD, Ulive.com: 75.000 USD, Cellphonecases.com: 75.000 USD, Wolfgangs.com: 50.000 USD, Pay.co: 46.000 USD, Pastor.com: 45.000 USD, iSugar.com: 45.000 USD, Assurance.org (insurance in French): 22.000 USD.

Performance in January: 1.29%
One of the best January performances we had so far, usually January has less earnings than December and therefore performance usually declines in the first month of the year, but this year´s January was strong and it looks like revenues from parked domains are generally up. Also Google announced important improvements for their advertising network that will increase revenues on parked pages especially if accessed from mobiles devices significantly.

What are we working on right now?
We had a very busy 2013 so far. We are about to seriously increase the AUM in the next months, we cannot say much more than this right now, but we will keep you informed – watch out for some big news (!). On a technical level we are currently working on increasing our parking revenues, from January to February we had an increase of 40% in parking revenues, we are doing this by optimizing our domains, purchasing traffic names, mass registrations of domains with traffic and dropcatching domains that are currently running out and become unregistered. Most of these projects are in cooperation with Domainindex.com the leader in domain name data mining. Our goal is to keep this strategy going over the year and to triple the parking revenues relative to the assets until the end of year with a target of 20% net performance for the Fund for 2013.

Opportunity for US Investors coming soon
We are working on a way to bring US investors on board with DDF, currently US Investors are not allowed to the fund. if you are based in the US and interested in an investment to DDF, let us know.

Domain Developers Fund Investors Report – January 2013

The market in 2012
Its been a good year for Domains allover, parking was strong and stable, developed domains did well and increased in income. Looking at the top list of deals, more sellers and buyers seem to be deciding not to publish deals anymore. Judging from the amount of smaller deals the market is strong and stable – especially with substantial increases in buy-now deals at Afternic and Sedo. Here is the list of the top (published) sales of 2012: Investing.com at 2.5 Mio USD, Personalloand.com at 1 mio. USD, Silver.com at 875.000 USD, FreeWebsite.com at 500.000 USD, Webhosting.co.uk at 500.000 USD, Challenge.com at 500.000 USD, Jackpot.com at 500.000 USD, Giftbasket at 350.000 USD and VI.com and BJ.com each at 325.000 USD. In addition to this I must say I know of about at least 10 more that would be in this list but are all under NDA now.

Performance in 2012: 12.97%, December: 2,56%
We close the year with a 12.97% net performance, having had a good December with  2.56% net. Parking revenues from our traffic portfolios drove performance, what we missed this year have been the bigger deals and sales, part of it because less buyers have been on the market, part of it also because we declined many offers because we are confident that the market will be stronger this year once the first nTLD´s are released and we can get much higher prices in the near future.

The Year 2013
We expect a very interesting year 2013, we will see the first new TLDs launched in 2013, this is definitely the most important single event in domain names to expect in 2013. While DDF is not invested in any of the companies running new TLDs, DDF has a clear strategy in place for registrations in new TLDs. As outlined earlier we do not expect that new TLD´s will impact the value of .com, .net, .org and ccTLDs, however we believe that they will become an alternative in some areas of the domain market.  We also expect many investors to jump into the market next year. There is a lot of interest in all type of domain based business from institutional investors, this development has likely been triggered by new TLD´s that have brought so much attention to domains to the mainstream media recently.
Concerning our strategy, we will increase investment in traffic domains over the next months, these have been driving our performance in the last months and they are only a small part of about 20% of the total portfolio. We plan to increase this to up to 35% of the invested funds and increase the performance by up to 5% with this measure only.

More Funds invest in DDF
We welcome 2 more Funds as  investors to DDF: Alternative Global Diversifed Fund, managed by Silver Lining Investment Management is a diversified fund of “alternative” investments (www.silverliningim.com), the other Fund is an institutional Fund based in Liechtenstein with a mixed strategy, both Funds also intend to increase their investments over the next months.

Domain Developers Fund Investors Report – October 2012

The market in October
So far the year has seen some great sales especially in the non-.com space again and even in .xxx, remarkable sales have been: Webhosting.co.uk 500.000 USD, online-casino.de at 144.000 USD, Toys.xxx at 125.000 USD; cheapcruises.co.uk 77.500 USD, Gruppenreisen.de 75.000 USD. The .com space is more calm (at least in the Mio. USD area) because some owners do not want to offer any names before the launch of the nTLDs, interesting sales are: Challenge.com 500.000 USD, Jackpot.com 500.000 USD, Freewebsite.com 500.000 USD, FreeSexCams.com 150.000 USD, Metal.com 140.000 USD, Designers.com 118.000 USD, Indi.com 115.000 USD and Paddle.com at 120.000 USD and a great IDN as well: 動画.com (means “video” in Japanese) at 35.000 USD.

DDF acquires Audit.com and Audits.com
As a new addition to the DDF prime names we have acquired Audit.com and Audits.com. We will not reveal the purchase price to the public. DDF will develop them as one site, off course related to auditing, but details will be revealed only in a couple of months. Besides development we plan to partner with companies in the auditing field.

Performance in September: 2.32% and YTD 9.22% with October, November and December to go.,
Monthly revenue was 2.32 % in September, Performance in the last 12 months was 15.44 % and year to date was 9.22% with another 3 usually strong months to go. Assets under Management are also up 10% in the last 2 months and we are negotiating with more prospective investors than ever before, many funds and family offices among them.

Develop, launch, develop, launch
DDF stands for Domain Developers and so we do: this week alone we soft-launched 2 new sites, and we have 6 more to come very soon:Exhibitions.com, a directory for international exhibitions, from wherever you are check which exhibitions are currently running, buy tickets, book hotels and flights as well. We currently have 5.000 exhibitions in our database and expect to grow the database to more than 100.000 within the next weeks. Another launch is Rebuildthis.com, a high performance mass-website building system for domainers, we use the system for DDF to rebuild websites that have been deployed earlier on domains and we rent the system out to other domainers as well. The system is aimed at owners of large domain portfolios.

Want to know more about the state of the Internet ?

One of the best presentations on the state of the web I came across recently, have a look at the businessinsider website.get in touch with us.

Domain Developers Fund Investors Report – September 2012

The market in August

So far the year has seen some great sales especially in the non-.com space again and even in .xxx, remarkable sales have been: online-casino.de at 144.000 USD, Toys.xxx at 125.000 USD; cheapcruises.co.uk 77.500 USD, Gruppenreisen.de 75.000 USD. The .com space is more calm because of the summer and some owners do not want to offer any names before the launch of the nTLDs, interesting sales are: Metal.com 140.000 USD, Designers.com 118.000 USD, Indi.com 115.000 USD and Paddle.com at 120.000 USD and a great IDN as well: 動画.com (means “video” in Japanese) at 35.000 USD.

Performance in the last 12 months: 14.27 %
Monthly revenue was 0.15% in August, with July and August traditionally the weakest month in parking and advertising revenues. September until January are usually the strongest months and we expect a year-end performance to settle around 15%.

Develop, launch, develop, launch
DDF stands for Domain Developers and so we do: this week alone we soft-launched 2 new sites, and we have 6 more to come very soon:Exhibitions.com, a directory for international exhibitions, from wherever you are check which exhibitions are currently running, buy tickets, book hotels and flights as well. We currently have 5.000 exhibitions in our database and expect to grow the database to more than 100.000 within the next weeks.  Another launch is Rebuildthis.com, a high performance mass-website building system for domainers, we use the system for DDF to rebuild websites that have been deployed earlier on domains and we rent the system out to other domainers as well. The system is aimed at owners of large domain portfolios.

Want to know more about Domains ?
Many of our investors are already experts in the field of domain names, some are still learning, we suggest the following sites if you wish to keep up to date about the topic:
Thedomains.com longtime domain Michael Berkens runs this excellent blog on domains
DnJournal.com The industries leading journal and the top sales every week by Ron Jackson.
Domainindex.com The leading domain appraisal service also offers domain price indices, whois information as well as a wide range of tools.
Sedo.com The leading domain sales platform
For our German and Austrian readers we have uploaded a copy of an article about the domain business that appeared recently in the Austrian magazine “profil”

Domain Developers Fund Investors Report – July 2012

The Market in June
What we currently see is a strong buyers-market, but what we also see are less great domains coming to the market or at least their sales are not reported (we know of at least 2 7-figure sales under NDA from just the last 2 months). So there are more sales of lower quality names, however the prices paid are great. Some of the most remarkable sales have been: Cricketscore.com at 118.000 USD, Mizu,com at 90.000 USD, Electriccompany.com at 85.000 USD and Circumcision.com at 45.000 USD. A remarkable sale in the ccTLD space is Finance.co.za (South Africa) at 70.000 USD which also makes us happy because we own 18 prime .co.za domains such as houses.co.za, shops.co.za and banks.co.za.

Performance in June: 2.29 %
June was a great month with strong revenue for the DDF, we expect to increase revenue from developed sites substantially in the next months and our target remains 15% performance over the year.

Portugal.net launched
In an ongoing joint venture with Senza Limiti the DDF launched Portugal.net. Another geo-directory among Holland.net, Belgium.net, Spain.net and Madrid.net. Portugal.net is a directory with about one million pages about businesses in Portugal. Next to launch are Portugal.net, Turkey.net and Egypt.net.

DDF initiates new internal research project
We have launched an internal research project to classify and discover domain names according to their sound, The current approach to determine the value of domain names are usually the length, the letters used, their placements of letters within the word and off course the amount of searches on Google, Bing and Yahoo for the word. However in a world where branding becomes more difficult because all the great .com names are gone new ventures simply look for great sounding phantasy names. And this is exactly what we do, by using special software that can determine the sound of words we are analyzing hundreds of millions of names and register the ones still available with the best sound. If you are working in the domain industry and you are interested in this project, let us know, we are interested in partnering up with you.

DDF´s approach to new TLD´s
By definition the DDF cannot be part of any of the startups handling new registrations because the DDF´s investment strategy is to invest in great domain names and this is what we will continue to do. At the ICANN meeting in Prague I had a  chat with domain-expert and nTLD investor Frank Schiling, I asked him how he looks at his collection of nTLDs and tells me: holistic. So this is also the way we look at them, As most of you know we are not very optimistic about nTLDs, however there will be successful ones and given the amount of generic extensions to come up (probably more than 400) there will be some great names among them. We will not concentrate on one or few of the nTLDs but take a holistic approach and find the best ones among all of them. What we have done so far is to compile a list of 8.5 Mio. new TLD domain names and analyzed their value in an automated way. Next we are going to manually scan the list and choose the best among them. The plan is to register great names in many of the extensions because we think that users will also take a hollistic view of the nTLDs. One of the reasons why we believe that the nTLD´s will be approached as a new set of domains is that the space for marketing is limited on registrars websites and we expect registrars to offer users a choice of domains that fit the topic the user requests and so much a particular extension, To better understand the point have a look at this funny video.

DDF availability at banks and brokers
If you are subscribing to the DDF via your bank or broker and need assistance please let us know. Most major banks accept subscriptions to the DDF, such as UBS, Credit Suisse, Barclays or Citigroup.
Banks such as HSBC and some brokers do not take orders for the DDF but we can be of assistance to help you with your subscription.

Visit us at the Domainvermarkterforum meeting in Dusseldorf
We will be at the Domainvermarkterforum in Duesseldorf on September 6 and 7, if you would like to meet up with us just reply to this email and we will get in touch with you.

Domain Developers Fund Investors Report – May 2012

The Market
Sedo, the worlds largest domain broker, reports a very strong quarter with 19.6 Mio.USD in sales and the market is strong allover with the Domainindex big TLD Index containing the biggest 9 TLD´s is up 5.5% in the month of April. This shows not only that the domain market is strong but also that its the top domains in the best TLDs that are moving up, the Global Domain Index (also provided by domainindex.com) based on all domain names was only up 1% in the same period. Largest reported sale was Personalloans.com at 1Mio USD, Jackpot.com at 500.000 USD, other remarkable sales are Saturn.pl at 190.000 USD, Flights.ca at 120.000 USD and App.me at 50.000 USD.

Performance back in March: 1.51 %
February traditionally is the slowest month in advertising and this can be felt immediatly in our traffic portfolio, the revenue was back in March and so was the performance with a plus of 1,51% for the month. We expect a great April as well, especially driven by sales. For the year our goal is still set at 15% performance.

DDF ranked #1 alternative fund at Barclayhedge
Barclayhedge, one of the worlds leading alternative investment Database lists the Domain Developers Fund now as the #1 Fund in the miscellaneous hedge funds section for 2011, outperforming all other uncorrelated products in this category with an annual performance of 16.37 % in the NAV. This is the first time the DDF has been ranked by a third party agency and immediatly we made it to the first place for our first full year of operations.

The new Swords.com and Books.so is life
We have partnered with developers to redeploy the new swords.com and its live now, so if you ever wanted to purchase a sword, this is the place to go, also do not forget to visit other sites we run such as the new spain.net, madrid.net, species.com and recently launched books.so, an experimental site deployed on a 10 USD domain from Somalia.

TLD strategy
WIth the new TLD´s coming up at the end of the year we will shift even more into the premium ,com and ccTLD (country code domains), still keeping away from smaller generic extensions such as .biz,.info,.tel,.mobi (we dont have any of these) and also moving more into the larger premium domain space.

Domain Developers Fund announces 16.37% annual net performance results

for 2011 and becomes #1 Alternative Fund at BarclayHedge

CAYMAN ISLANDS–(EON: Enhanced Online News)–The Domain Developers Fund, a public open fund investing in internet domain names only, today announced an annual performance of 16.37 % in the NAV of the fund, compared to a projected target increase of 15% for FY 2011. Sales have increase 240% compared with 2010 and the AUM has doubled during 2011.

During the fiscal year 2011, the Domain Developers Fund made some major transactions including the acquisitions of Swords.com, Exhibitions.com, Holland.net and Belgium.net along with the sale of Howareyou.com, cars.net and many others. The domain industry as a whole saw an increase of 11% in value based on Domainindex.com for .COM domains.

Revenues from parked domains have been stable and sales have been increasing over the year with no signs of a weak economy in the domain industry. The fund manages 5000 valuable domains and many more traffic generating domains, about 200 domains have been build out to projects, such as Holland.net, Belgium.net, species.com and swords.com. The fund operates its own SEO and Programming teams and technology expects the AUM to double again in 2012.

“The performance and the increase in the assets under management show that our plan of introducing Internet domain names as a new asset class is a working concept and that people are interested in the idea of investing in domain names in the same manner they invest in real estate,” Marcovici noted.

Barclayhedge, one of the worlds leading alternative investment Database lists the Domain Developers Fund now as the #1 Fund in the miscellaneous Hedge Funds section for 2011, outperforming all other uncorrelated products in this category.

The Domain Developers Fund’s management anticipates that next annual earnings will be stronger due to increased efforts in developing high end domains. Domain Developers Fund continues to expect a performance of 15% for 2012´.

Headquartered in Cayman Islands, the Domain Developers Fund is the first and only public open-ended investment fund that invests in domains: the Internet’s real estate. The Fund was a managed account by private domainers before it incorporated in August 2010 in the Cayman Islands, the Funds investors are mainly private individuals as well as family offices and few funds. The DDF is administered by JPFund and audited by BDO.

Domain Developers Fund Investors Report – February 2012

The Market report and how it affects one of our recent aquisitions!
Perhaps the most remarkable transaction in the last month was privatejet.com.  This premium domain name has been aquired by Nations Luxury Transportation LLC. for 30 Million USD in cash and stocks and to our knowledge this is highest ever price paid for a pure domain name. The good news for DDF is that we just recently aquired privatjets.de (at a fraction of the price) and such deals usually drive the value of the keyword in all TLD´s up – the full story is here.  Other remarkable sales have been personalloans.com at 1 Mio. USD, BowlingBalls.com at 225.000 USD, diy.org at 60.000 USD and Lotto.net at 43.000 USD.

Exhibitions.com
One of our most recent aquisitions is exhibitions.com.  2.2 Million people search for this keyword each month on Google and our plan is to develop the name into a portal to find exhibitions and events by city, date and topics etc. We have already started working on the site but do not expect it to be online before the summer.

Strong performance: 16.37 % in for 2011
When we planned the year our goal was to reach 15% of net revenue for our investors and we are pleased to report that we produced a stronger performance of 16.37% over the year. We expect to make the same kind of returns in 2012 especially since most developments have just started recently and have not produced revenue so far but are still building up traffic.  We are working hard on promoting and marketing the sites.

Missed us at NOAH in London?  Have a look at the video
We were invited to present the DDF at NOAH 2011 in front of 1000 delegates in London.  If you missed our presentation, here is a video of our director Michael Marcovici.

Domain Developers Fund Investors Report – January 2012

The Market report and how to make money with the only possible buyer
Mostremarkable sale of the month was definitely dudu.com, a domain brokered by sedo. The chinese owner sold it to the Dubai based (and obviously well funded) social network godudu.com, that decided to switch to the shorter dudu.com name. The price was one million Dollar, a very high price for such a name but fair enough to improve the brand of such a large social portal. Congratulations.

swords.com
DDF just aquired swords.com before the end of the year. Swords.com is not only a niche category domain but also a website that already produces revenues and we expect to grow the site substantially over the next months. The current site is still the old shop and we expect to have the new version online by may 2012.

Strong performance: 3.3 % in November
November was one of our best months ever, the main reasons have been our second biggest sale of the year, howareyou.com (price is under NDA), other smaller sales, advertising and parking revenues as well as evaluations. We already have an approximate result for December which was not so strong and we expect to close the year at arround 15% performance for the year. Investors should consider that we are still building up our portfolio and that we expect to generate increasing revenues from domain sales in the near future.

Buying domains
One way to purchase domains by the DDF is to buy them from the so called “drops”. Every day about 100.000 domains become available again after ther registration has not been renewed. Most of these names don´t have much value but some do have substantial value and in this case domainers filter the lists of droping names and auction the names of, the winner of the auction has the right to reregister the name the second it becomes available. Recently aquired names of the DDF from the drops are: morethanmoney.com, creativitylab.com, coaltrade.com and many more all for under or around 1000 USD.

Visit us at Domainfest in St.Monica from January 29 to February 2nd and in NY from January 25 to 29
Domainfest has become the biggest domainer event currently, more then 800 guest are expected for this networking and conferencing event. If you want to meet up with us in St. Monica let us know as soon as possible, we will be there. We will also be in New York from January 25 to January 29 if you want to meet with us and discuss investments or domain related issues.

Domain Developers Fund – Investors Report – December 2011

The Market report an what really drives the market
Of course all domainers love to report the million-dollar deals and talk about them, however, the domain market does not depend on them, they occur only rarely, in fact most domains that are sold in the day-to-day business are in a different price range, here are some examples just from last week:
makassar.com 40.000 USD, ibud.com 25.000 USD, wjm.com at 10.000 USD, parkhere.com at 8825 USD, tomatoworld.com 6400 USD, oopstv.com 5400 usd and urbanharvest.com at 5000 USD.

Spain.net and Madrid.net
With Spain.net and Madrid.net we are launching 2 more of our Geo-sites, both are now online, while the database needs some more time to build up, the basic site can be seen already.

Strong performance: 2.7% in October
October has been one of the strongest month in this year with 2.7% increase and traditionally November and December are even stronger due to the holiday season and the increased spending in online advertising. We are currently working on the NAV for November which we hope to release soon and expect an even bigger increase in value.

Microsoft releases Domain study showing the importance of domain names
Not really news to domainers, but a great piece of research from Microsoft on the importance of domains, I just want to point out a few of the sentences in the study: “It should not be surprising that users have learned to trust some domains over others. ” and ”What is surprising is that users click on results from rep-utable domains even when more relevant search results are available.” The original paper can be found here.

Visit us at Domainfest in St.Monica from January 29 to February 2nd
Domainfest has become the biggest domainer event currently, more then 800 guest are expected for this networking and conferencing event. If you want to meet up with us in St. Monica let us know as soon as possible, we wil be there.