I've developed Mum.com as a blog for mums and I'm planning to add a shop in due course. If a UK retailer expressed an interest in the domain, how much do you think it could be worth?
Mum.com was registered in Oct 1994 so it's over 15 years old. Baby.com was registered in Apr 1995 and is owned by Johnson and Johnson. They had revenue of $64bn in 2008. Mom.com was registered in Dec 1994 and is owned by CafeMom.com. CafeMom.com is the 810th ranked site by traffic in the US according to Alexa. Mum.com gets about 20,000 type-ins per year.
I've developed 2-3 sites before Mum.com and they have always fallen down on SEO and search engine traffic so I contacted a local company called ithinkMedia in the week who do the SEO for Mothercare and the Early Learning Centre.
They said they couldn't do any SEO on the site because of a non-compete clause with Mothercare. I asked if they had a contact at Mothercare so I could speak to them about working together on Mum.com. Mothercare started a blog in Nov 09 at Mothercare Blog and I was thinking of turning Mum.com into a blog for celebrity mums.
They said they were going to Mothercare's Watford office next week and would run it by them. They asked whether I was looking to become affiliated with Mothercare in some way or sell the domain. I said either, but that if I sold the domain I would be looking for around £150,000.
The SEO guy said that was far too much for a domain with 20,000 type-ins. I said you couldn't value Mum.com on a multiple of type-ins because it had standalone value as a brandable LLL.com. I gave him the example of Fly.com selling for $1.8m in 2009 to TravelZoo. Fly.com wouldn't have massive type-in but if you wanted to advertise air travel it would stand out and stick in people's minds better than any other domain. I could have mentioned Guy.com selling at $1m or Men.com selling for $1.3m as further examples of the heights brandable and commercial LLL.coms can scale.
He said for £150,000 he could get 1m targeted visitors for Mothercare. I said yes but once you had paid for the traffic it would tail off whereas as Mum.com would continue to get 20,000 type-ins a year. Plus since generic domains have resale value, he should be considering the cost of tying up £150,000 in a domain name rather than the initial outlay. Hence, if you assumed you could get 5% interest on the £150,000, it costs £7,500 per year for a company to own Mum.com which would work out to 35p per click compared to the 20p I pay Google Adwords so £150,000 wasn't outlandish.
The SEO guy thought I would be more likely to get Mothercare's interest with a domain like PushChairs.co.uk. I said that was like comparing apples and oranges and if Google changed their algorithm tomorrow to eliminate the ranking benefit of a domain URL, domains like PushChairs.co.uk would lose value but Mum.com would retain it's value because you would get better value for money with TV, newspaper, magazine, radio, and billboard ads, because more people would notice Mum.com and remember it. Plus you have the 15+ years ageing and exclusivity of a brandable, commercial LLL.com.
One thing I found from looking into this is there are 17,576 LLL.com permutations but only 1,012 meaningful 3 letter words according to the Scrabble dictionary. Here's a link;
Two-Letter and Three-Letter Scrabble Words
If you look through the list of Scrabble 3 letter words hardly any of them have any real commercial value so domains like Mum.com are very rare.
Finally, he said people is the US use Mom so there would only be a handful of potential buyers in the UK. I said people in France use Mare and people in Italy use Mama, but that doesn't detract from the value of Mom.com. Mum is used in the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, parts of Canada, Holland, Singapore, and some parts of the US like New England so that's alot of mums.
80% of women become mums and 80% of household expenditure is controlled by mums so they are a key consumer group for retailers. For example, Iceland use "Mum's gone to Iceland" as a slogan because mums are their key customer. One of the reasons they chose to use Kerry Katona in their ads was because she was Celeb Mum of the Year twice.
I thought I'd post this because Mum.com is a domain alot of people can relate to, and it highlights some interesting domain issues like the trade-off between type-in and brandability, and the question of whether generic category domain ownership conveys market leadership or provide benefits beyond the type-ins they generate.
If you were Mothercare and had £750m of turnover, would you give up 0.02% of it to buy Mum.com? Any views on Mum.com would be much appreciated.
Mum.com was registered in Oct 1994 so it's over 15 years old. Baby.com was registered in Apr 1995 and is owned by Johnson and Johnson. They had revenue of $64bn in 2008. Mom.com was registered in Dec 1994 and is owned by CafeMom.com. CafeMom.com is the 810th ranked site by traffic in the US according to Alexa. Mum.com gets about 20,000 type-ins per year.
I've developed 2-3 sites before Mum.com and they have always fallen down on SEO and search engine traffic so I contacted a local company called ithinkMedia in the week who do the SEO for Mothercare and the Early Learning Centre.
They said they couldn't do any SEO on the site because of a non-compete clause with Mothercare. I asked if they had a contact at Mothercare so I could speak to them about working together on Mum.com. Mothercare started a blog in Nov 09 at Mothercare Blog and I was thinking of turning Mum.com into a blog for celebrity mums.
They said they were going to Mothercare's Watford office next week and would run it by them. They asked whether I was looking to become affiliated with Mothercare in some way or sell the domain. I said either, but that if I sold the domain I would be looking for around £150,000.
The SEO guy said that was far too much for a domain with 20,000 type-ins. I said you couldn't value Mum.com on a multiple of type-ins because it had standalone value as a brandable LLL.com. I gave him the example of Fly.com selling for $1.8m in 2009 to TravelZoo. Fly.com wouldn't have massive type-in but if you wanted to advertise air travel it would stand out and stick in people's minds better than any other domain. I could have mentioned Guy.com selling at $1m or Men.com selling for $1.3m as further examples of the heights brandable and commercial LLL.coms can scale.
He said for £150,000 he could get 1m targeted visitors for Mothercare. I said yes but once you had paid for the traffic it would tail off whereas as Mum.com would continue to get 20,000 type-ins a year. Plus since generic domains have resale value, he should be considering the cost of tying up £150,000 in a domain name rather than the initial outlay. Hence, if you assumed you could get 5% interest on the £150,000, it costs £7,500 per year for a company to own Mum.com which would work out to 35p per click compared to the 20p I pay Google Adwords so £150,000 wasn't outlandish.
The SEO guy thought I would be more likely to get Mothercare's interest with a domain like PushChairs.co.uk. I said that was like comparing apples and oranges and if Google changed their algorithm tomorrow to eliminate the ranking benefit of a domain URL, domains like PushChairs.co.uk would lose value but Mum.com would retain it's value because you would get better value for money with TV, newspaper, magazine, radio, and billboard ads, because more people would notice Mum.com and remember it. Plus you have the 15+ years ageing and exclusivity of a brandable, commercial LLL.com.
One thing I found from looking into this is there are 17,576 LLL.com permutations but only 1,012 meaningful 3 letter words according to the Scrabble dictionary. Here's a link;
Two-Letter and Three-Letter Scrabble Words
If you look through the list of Scrabble 3 letter words hardly any of them have any real commercial value so domains like Mum.com are very rare.
Finally, he said people is the US use Mom so there would only be a handful of potential buyers in the UK. I said people in France use Mare and people in Italy use Mama, but that doesn't detract from the value of Mom.com. Mum is used in the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, parts of Canada, Holland, Singapore, and some parts of the US like New England so that's alot of mums.
80% of women become mums and 80% of household expenditure is controlled by mums so they are a key consumer group for retailers. For example, Iceland use "Mum's gone to Iceland" as a slogan because mums are their key customer. One of the reasons they chose to use Kerry Katona in their ads was because she was Celeb Mum of the Year twice.
I thought I'd post this because Mum.com is a domain alot of people can relate to, and it highlights some interesting domain issues like the trade-off between type-in and brandability, and the question of whether generic category domain ownership conveys market leadership or provide benefits beyond the type-ins they generate.
If you were Mothercare and had £750m of turnover, would you give up 0.02% of it to buy Mum.com? Any views on Mum.com would be much appreciated.
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