One of the best domain names ever for sale: casino.live

[TheGooner]

As I said I expect someone somewhere to pay four figures for the casino.live domain if promoted correctly - so I'm not saying it's valueless - I just do not see that it actually gives any advantage to a functioning website. It's easy to remember - but it's very generic and brandless.

The best destinations on the net are NOT generic - they have a brand.
- Online casino? Hundreds all with a brand like RiverBelle, Jackpot City, Blackjack Ballroom, Manhattan Slots etc.
- Online Poker? Fulltilt or Pokerstars, the old Doyles Room?
- Movie reviews? Rottentomatoes.com (awful for type in with spelling issues - but it works)
- Hotel Bookings? TripAdvisor.com

Domainers will disagree - but then domainers don't actually go out and try to develop the space - they're salesmen for "potential" and much of what they have to say about the practicalities of turning domains into destinations is inaccurate or out of date.

And having investigated I do not see the .live suffix becoming a mainstream use - reducing type in traffic too.
Many of the new suffixes promoted (.casino, .sports, .shop, .hotel etc) will have an initial price spike on hype but poor longevity as websites.

As a prime example - go back to 2010 : Does anyone remember that hype around .mobi domains?
The hype was correct that mobile traffic would become a major factor ... but it was wrong that a .mobi domain would bring an advantage.

Does ANYONE use a .mobi at all now?

Saying "Because of a number of reasons this domain name is becoming more expensive every week." is just inaccurate (or hype) IMO.

[DanHorvat]

EMDs are great.

But the problem with this particular one is that the live casino niche seems to be occupied by sports betting brands, and there's no chance for me as an affiliate to build a site that outranks them for "live casino" or "casino live".

The most obvious reason being the backlinks they're getting from their thousands of affiliates, and the amount of time their visitors stay on the site.

I don't see a single affiliate in the top 50 results. They are all brands offering live dealer casino. And that's what people expect to see in the SERPs anyway when they type in "live casino".

The two most popular affiliate sites that focus exclusively on live casinos don't have much traffic.

So I don't think this domain is of any worth to affiliates, but could be worth a lot to an operator.

[Bizdo]

Many of really successful affiliates leave money on the table as they don't understand the value of domains. If you are making $100k per month that doesn't mean it is your maximum. For example, someone took MyReallyCoolBrandableDomain.com for $8 and use it for his website which makes $100k per month. Although he is doing great, I am 100% sure he would be making more if he took KeywordFull.com domain name and do everything exactly the same. EMD would rank better (100% sure, if everything else is completely the same), at least for the keyword phrase in domain name. This could mean hundreds of clicks more per day, and automatically higher profit.
The other thing is trust. Once you build your brand it is the same (regarding trust) if you own Casino.com or bWin.com, but when you are unknown I am sure 99% of people will deposit on Casino.com rather than bWin.com (if both sites are of the same quality).
It is the same in other niches. Lets say you want to pay for insurance online and you came across Insurance.com and Insurcoo.com. It is no brainer to whom will trust the majority of first time visitors.

Nobody can tell me that bWin.com, Bet365.com or Ladbrokes.com are better domains than Betting.com. Yes, you can achieve global success with LadBrokes.com or Cooldoooo.com but if you do the same web and SEO development with Betting.com it will be quicker, easier and more profitable. BTW, I don't see any reason why Betting.com could not be a brand, together with the extension.

For starter, Casino.live is much better than any brandable domain.

[TheGooner]

Hi Bizdo thanks for your contribution to the discussion.
It always helps to have viewpoints from as many members as possible.


I understand your reasoning - but I don't agree with many of the examples or conclusions you came to.

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Firstly, you talk about brands vs keywords and assume that keywords will do better ("if everything else is exactly the same") - where you seem to ignore that fact that much of the success of the branded domain is the brand itself - people actually know it, remember it, and search for it.

Branding provides a second specific stream of search engine traffic outside the keywords of the content, and also means that type-in traffic is possible too.

Business the world over know the power of branding, all successful businesses do it and have websites that match their brands not the generic EMD that matches their business product. Amazon doesn't have books.com, ebay doesn't need auctions.com, coke doesn't want want fizzy.drinks or anything like that - they leverage off their brand name for traffic not the type of product they sell.

So Ladbrokes.com and bet365.com ARE better than betting.com - they are quickly associated with betting - but they also get additional streams of traffic on their brand name and direct type in traffic that the generic betting.com (does it exist?) will never get.

Betting.com will always struggle to own a brand - because it's a word already used for that activity not a company and it's going to be very difficult to create a TMable location.

Far better to be a search engine company called something weird (like GOOGLE) and get your brand so associated with the idea of search engines that the general public says that they are going to "google it" when they mean use a search engine .. which is nearly always google.

DERAIL : I just checked - betting.com appears to be a badly out of date sports news site! /DERAIL


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Secondly, you talk about trust, and seem to think that generic-label.com engenders trust. It doesn't.
And certainly a generic label domain with a new extension has ZERO trust in most peoples eyes.

What engenders trust is the brand. The association that you have with an organisation from prior dealings.
So if I want to do my banking I look for Westpac (my bank) not bank.com and certainly not bank.live

If I look for insurance - I want my specific insurance company - not insurance.com which is probably some sort of generic middle man.
BRANDS develop trust - not generic business labels with no history.

It's my experience that VERY few of the generic label sites have ever developed into decent locations.

I can think of two - booking.com which does hotel bookings - and money.com which isn't actually a site but a redirect to time.com's money magazine subsection. Most of the rest have been bought and sold with a lot of hype, but have failed to take off because they lack branding.

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Finally, you talk about the recent trend for extensions and seem to think that they have widespread appeal outside the domain community.
I just don't see it. Anywhere.

These themed extensions simply seem to have been jumped upon by spammers, scrapers and low rent business looking for a cheap trick.

People rank .com (or equivlent country matches like .co.uk, .com.au, .de etc) way ahead of all the .junk that appears.

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So for me casino.live has no brandability, is a try-hard but struggling extension, and has little to recommend itself other than to a select group of people working in the domaining and SEO areas who might be able to sell links off it or make a bit of money in the SEO eco-system.

But it's just my view on the subject - and as I said earlier I appreciate you presenting your viewpoint so I can understand it. If we ever meet at a conference then I'm sure we could share some very interesting information together in a more relaxed atmosphere and really get a handle on each others views.


Thanks.

[betsec]

Many of really successful affiliates leave money on the table as they don't understand the value of domains. If you are making $100k per month that doesn't mean it is your maximum. For example, someone took MyReallyCoolBrandableDomain.com for $8 and use it for his website which makes $100k per month. Although he is doing great, I am 100% sure he would be making more if he took KeywordFull.com domain name and do everything exactly the same. EMD would rank better (100% sure, if everything else is completely the same), at least for the keyword phrase in domain name. This could mean hundreds of clicks more per day, and automatically higher profit.
The other thing is trust. Once you build your brand it is the same (regarding trust) if you own Casino.com or bWin.com, but when you are unknown I am sure 99% of people will deposit on Casino.com rather than bWin.com (if both sites are of the same quality).
It is the same in other niches. Lets say you want to pay for insurance online and you came across Insurance.com and Insurcoo.com. It is no brainer to whom will trust the majority of first time visitors.

Nobody can tell me that bWin.com, Bet365.com or Ladbrokes.com are better domains than Betting.com. Yes, you can achieve global success with LadBrokes.com or Cooldoooo.com but if you do the same web and SEO development with Betting.com it will be quicker, easier and more profitable. BTW, I don't see any reason why Betting.com could not be a brand, together with the extension.

For starter, Casino.live is much better than any brandable domain.

Thanks, Bizdo. This is one of the best replies here.

I would like just to add that if someone wants to understand the true value of "casino.live", he should have skill, experience and then take a few days for business analysis. It is hard to comment about this top-class domain name "casino.live" without a deep market analysis.
That's why I wrote "a SMART casino guy who grabs this domain name from me will make a fortune". The buyer should be smart and experienced, able to anticipate the industry. I am sure, even though there are thousands of new doman extensions and dozens of old ones, there will not be ever a better opportunity than "casino.live" and "casino.online". But I value "casino.live" even more, because "casino.online" is much harder to promote from SEO/SEM point of view.

[Muppet]

I'll pass on my thoughts of the value of this domain. Others have said it better.

betsec, while you're calling people who disagree with you unprofessional, unskilled, inexperienced and not smart, you should take a look at yourself. You sound like one of those guys that used to approach people on the street trying to sell overpriced loudspeakers out the back of a white van, not an industry professional.

Keep it sensible instead of posting this silly hype and you might have more success.

[Bizdo]

Hi Bizdo thanks for your contribution to the discussion.
It always helps to have viewpoints from as many members as possible.


I understand your reasoning - but I don't agree with many of the examples or conclusions you came to.

Thanks for taking the time to respond in details, but I am sorry, I don't agree I think you didn't get my point.
I hope OP will not mind discussion in his thread.

Firstly, you talk about brands vs keywords and assume that keywords will do better ("if everything else is exactly the same") - where you seem to ignore that fact that much of the success of the branded domain is the brand itself - people actually know it, remember it, and search for it.

Well, on 4th August 1999 nobody knew about Bet365.com except the owners of that domain name. You cant take it as an advantage today. Yes, it is global brand now, but it would be the case even if they took xgfdb.com or Betting.com on 4th August and do everything exactly the same as they did with Bet365.com. In that case today we would have XGFDB.com as a leading brand in this niche, or Betting.com.
I don't see any problem with branding generic keyword as a brand, except you need to use extension too. That should not be a problem at all. Booking.com is just one example. You cant say "betting" and expect everyone will know you mean about Betting.com, but you also cant say "bet" and expect everyone will know you mean about Bet365. As you need to add "365" after "Bet" to identify the brand, you would need to add ".com" after "betting" to identify Betting.com brand (if it would exist).

I am not sure if I expressed my self well, but I wanted to say that anything could become a brand, including full domains with the extension. You can even make TM from domain name, you simply register "Betting.com" as TM. So not just "betting", but "Betting.com". Boom, you have a brand! And now its up to you to promote it. You can promote it by yourself, or your service will promote it if you will be very good. Google is very stupid name, but Google search engine is the best and that promotes it. It would achieve the same success under Booble or Rooble name too. It is enough that the name is memorable.

Branding provides a second specific stream of search engine traffic outside the keywords of the content, and also means that type-in traffic is possible too.

Business the world over know the power of branding, all successful businesses do it and have websites that match their brands not the generic EMD that matches their business product. Amazon doesn't have books.com, ebay doesn't need auctions.com, coke doesn't want want fizzy.drinks or anything like that - they leverage off their brand name for traffic not the type of product they sell.

So Ladbrokes.com and bet365.com ARE better than betting.com - they are quickly associated with betting - but they also get additional streams of traffic on their brand name and direct type in traffic that the generic betting.com (does it exist?) will never get.

Betting.com will always struggle to own a brand - because it's a word already used for that activity not a company and it's going to be very difficult to create a TMable location.

Don't agree again
I didnt check if Amazon have Books.com, but I am sure it would help their business and even they are a giant they miss some potential customers by not owning Books.com. They also risk that some serious global player would take Books.com and become serious competitor to them. Ok, this is something different, but worth of mentioning too.
I am sure Books.com or Betting.com receive significant amount of type in traffic.

Here is one other example. RayBan and SunGlasses.com. RayBan is a global brand and everyone associate it with sun glasses. If they started under SunGlasses.com instead of RayBan.com they could become a brand of the same global influence, but they would be using different name (SunGlasses.com). I don't believe RayBan name helped them. Their quality and marketing helped them, or it would be enough for any new business to show up with a cool brandable name and to count on success in any business .
Yes, RayBan became a global brand and doing great, but they would be a brand of the same influence even with SunGlasses.com brand name BUT in that case they would have even more customers! Why? Because there are many people who want sun glasses but are not sure if they want RayBan or Police or some other brand. They will type "sun glasses", not "RayBan". With SunGlasses.com you would be easily catching them, but with COOLNOOM.com you wont. It is the same with betting. Don't look Bet365 today, look them 20 years ago.

Far better to be a search engine company called something weird (like GOOGLE) and get your brand so associated with the idea of search engines that the general public says that they are going to "google it" when they mean use a search engine .. which is nearly always google.

Yes, this is the case today, but it was not the case when they started in the garage or wherever. They would succed with any other name, including SearchEngine.com.

DERAIL : I just checked - betting.com appears to be a badly out of date sports news site! /DERAIL

Didnt check, but maybe. However, this means nothing. I was very good in playing football, but never go pro as was lazy for trainings. It was wasted talent, the same as Betting.com with outdate website is wasted perfect premium domain
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Secondly, you talk about trust, and seem to think that generic-label.com engenders trust. It doesn't.
And certainly a generic label domain with a new extension has ZERO trust in most peoples eyes.

I have to disagree again You want to tell that you would not have more trust in Casino.com then JohnsAdultEntertainment.com? Again, considering that both sites are of the same quality.
For example, there are thousands of Chinese online stores. If I need to buy something on one of them I usully check reviews. When I came accros JD.com I did not check anything as their domain told me they are serious.

What engenders trust is the brand. The association that you have with an organisation from prior dealings.
So if I want to do my banking I look for Westpac (my bank) not bank.com and certainly not bank.live

OK, when you mentioned Westpac I can tell you that I first time heard for them and I would trust Bank.com 100x more than Westpac.
You are showing again that you didnt get my point. I am not saying brandable name could not be good, I am just saying Casino.com is better than Bet365 name. Once you try Bet365 and they prove they are good you will trust them, but it is more likely that you will try Casino.com instead of Bet365 if you first time hear about both and have only ony chance to try just one of them.

If I look for insurance - I want my specific insurance company - not insurance.com which is probably some sort of generic middle man.
BRANDS develop trust - not generic business labels with no history.

Again What if Insurance.com is a company, not some middleman? What it they are in the business for decades and prove themselves already? I dont see any reason why in that case they would not be a better choise then BrandInsurance. Insurance.com would also be able to catch undecided seekers for insurance, what BrandIsurance would not.

It's my experience that VERY few of the generic label sites have ever developed into decent locations.

I can think of two - booking.com which does hotel bookings - and money.com which isn't actually a site but a redirect to time.com's money magazine subsection. Most of the rest have been bought and sold with a lot of hype, but have failed to take off because they lack branding.

Their owners just did not do quality branding or they were not offering quality services. Thats all. Booking.com is one example of great brand which contains domain extension in it.


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Finally, you talk about the recent trend for extensions and seem to think that they have widespread appeal outside the domain community.
I just don't see it. Anywhere.

These themed extensions simply seem to have been jumped upon by spammers, scrapers and low rent business looking for a cheap trick.

People rank .com (or equivlent country matches like .co.uk, .com.au, .de etc) way ahead of all the .junk that appears.

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So for me casino.live has no brandability, is a try-hard but struggling extension, and has little to recommend itself other than to a select group of people working in the domaining and SEO areas who might be able to sell links off it or make a bit of money in the SEO eco-system.

But it's just my view on the subject - and as I said earlier I appreciate you presenting your viewpoint so I can understand it.

Thanks.

Extensions are another subject The problem of non .com and non .ccTLD extensions is that people might not trust them and might not recall them later or will think it was a .com.
However, according to Google you can rank with .live the same as with .com. But you cant rank with brandable name the same as with an EMD, if all other factors are the same.
I noticed that many people dont understand the value of domains, and even that many "SEO EXPERTS" actually dont understand SEO as they should as "experts".


Please dont take my reply as some kind of argue. I appreciate your thinking, but I simply dont agree and wanted to explain why. You already proved that you know how to be successful in affiliate niche. There are many really successful affiliates on this forum, but I believe that despite of that many dont understand that some domains are valued at five, six or seven figures with a reason.

[Simmo!]

The ability of a domain to rank and for it to gain trust are different things though. Just because a domain ranks at No. 1 doesn't mean it is definitely trustworthy. Down the years, some casino brands have ranked high yet you wouldn't have wanted to play there.

The bottom line is that the days when an EMD did the job for you are disappearing. Yes, I believe there is still benefit in owning a good EMD but you still need to match the big guns in your niche for effort and content before that will come into play. In time to come, I suspect EMD will have no value in SEO terms as that is the downward trend we are seeing from Google. But that doesn't render them useless - it just makes branding it more important.

Personally, I won't buy any extension other than .com (or a country code if I am aiming at a specific country), however a good generic EMD .com would still be appealing: but maybe a 10th of what I would have paid when EMD domains were Google gold because I know now I would still have to throw a lot of resources at it to stand a chance of competing.

When slots.com sold in 2010 it sold for $5.5m and at the time I thought that was not unreasonable. It went to an operator with a lot of cash for marketing. It is now a portal and it has been SEO'ed to the hilt yet it sits halfway down Page 2 in serps for "slots" now, which just goes to show an EMD is no longer an easy ride.

[Simmo!]

Incidentally one other thing that will add value to casino.live potentially is the popularity of the extension ".live". A lot of the value of generic EMD's was and still is because they attract type-ins but obviously that requires widespread acceptance of the extension like .com, .co.uk. If .live gets that then that would definitely make this domain more valuable.

If anyone is speculating on new extensions for the long term, the potential popularity of the extension is definitely something you should consider IMO.

[TheGooner]

Please dont take my reply as some kind of argue. I appreciate your thinking, but I simply dont agree and wanted to explain why.

I understand - and that sharing of opinion - even when we disagree - this is what makes a very good forum.
Good luck with your business venture.

[DanHorvat]

The same argument over and over again. "I created a brand with a $10 domain name, therefore EMDs are worthless".

First of all, not everyone is building a brand. Not everyone has 5+ years to spend on nursing one project to recognition. Second of all, there is that thing with some ads that people and companies are spending billions of dollars annually on.

EMDs aren't meant to do for you what a proper brand name would, they exist for the purpose of helping you rank higher for your target keywords or/and reduce the PPC cost on Adwords or/and making your competitors pay PPC while you don't have to. It's all about the money. And it's quantifiable.

For example, "live casino" has 18.100 monthly searches with around €30 cost per click, which sums up to about €550.000 per month. If the clickthrough rate for #1 result in SERPs is 35%, then the value of being #1 for "live casino" is about €192.500 per month.

I happen to own an exact .com match of a keyword that has 180.000 monthy searches with €0.25 CPC. You do the math. That particular domain also makes me the owner of the entire niche, and is my most prized asset. The others are now in a position where they are forced to invent brand names, include hyphens, go with .info, or take new TLDs just to try to keep up with me. But they can't - the EMD is mine.

Not all EMDs are as good as that one, there are better and worse ones. Owning car.com, cars.com, usedcars.com or carinsurance.com isn't the same. The examples which are brought up in these discussions aren't EMDs I'd like to own - money.com is useless. moneyloan.com, moneytransfer.com, now those are proper domains.

One thing you keep forgetting - a brand can be behind an EMD. casino.live can be a site on which you find Unibet live casino. Could be their way of beating William Hill (currently #1 in SERPs).

Funny - I see carinsurance.com on #5 on US Google, and they seem to have around 200.000 visits per month. They're an affiliate site. Estibot values that particular domain at $1.43 mil, and I'd say it's not too far off. Apparently there are 1.000.000 monthly Google searches for "car insurance" with €14.09 CPC. And there are 6.15m broad search matches per month.

Furthermore, Geico can go down (CVC Capital Partners may buy them and ruin everything), but "car insurance" is here to stay as long as there's cars. How much is it worth to own a word? Or a term? Or a money-making search term? People who search for "car insurance" actually need it - usually right away - and will pay for it.

Sometimes it's beneficial to be brand-less and to give people exactly what they search for.

If you owned carinsurance.com, your opinion on EMDs would change in a heartbeat, Gooner.

[villa10]

Nice domain name.

Based on the 2015 top domain sales IMO the price will be 10-30K, if you find the right buyer.

The problem with the domain industry is to get emotionally attached with the property.
Your domain needs to be attractive to buyers, not you.

Good luck

[Yoda]

There is a reason why 888 and others own in many cases the best keyword of their field.
They don’t do it for fun.

Some of you are looking at it from the perspective of someone who is inside the industry…
Imagine you are NOT from the industry and don’t know the different brands. It's hard.. but do try…
So let's say I am new and see an ad for
Lasvegas.casino or for bet365casino.com

Which will I click which will I remember for next time?
The answer is clear and proven by research.

Indiegogo.com who built a crowdfunding empire, similar to Kickstarter has now taken their side business for NGO's under geneorsity.com. The reason being that it's just much easier when it comes to branding! With all their branding they woudl have preferred crowdfunding.com

Look at it again as an outsider… You hear many names.. or just a few. You don’t have time..
So you go to the one that is most intuitive and describes what you are looking for.. it is a no brainer… It's called human nature.
Heck…most of you are to busy to even read this post…who the heck has time for all this )

There is a reason that books.com goes to barnesandnoble.com. They will never sell it to Amazon!

By the way, exactly because of the POWER of branding Amazon who you claim are not idiots had applied for a ton of new gTLD's.. so it's not just domainers…

Regarding trust- No one was saying that it's about whether it's deserved or not… It is up to the people who run the site to give the trust and credibility. The domain gets the people to through the gate. How you in reality will treat them?.. well… you need to be trustworthy, give good content etc…

Why do you think Google in addition to Amazon applied for so many new extensions too? Domains are going to be crucial for branding and mostly for search engines to give you what you are looking for..Yes.. Some extensions will fail.. but that's another story…

The person who mentioned slots.com…or casino.com… It doesn’t matter what they have on it now. If I see an ad or want to go to anything with slots or casinos.. my first instinct if I'm not from the industry is to type it in, or if I were to see an ad of theirs I would click on theirs and not others.
The fact that it's not utilized correctly, has nothing to do with its potential. Fact is that there are companies who do really well with keyword domains.

Cheers,
Yoda

[Simmo!]

The person who mentioned slots.com…or casino.com… It doesn’t matter what they have on it now. If I see an ad or want to go to anything with slots or casinos.. my first instinct if I'm not from the industry is to type it in, or if I were to see an ad of theirs I would click on theirs and not others.

I agree totally - that was exactly my point in mentioning slots.com as an example: to show that what you do with the domain is way more important than it's value from an SEO perspective.

[Karri]

Keywords aside I don't think there is all that many people who use online live casinos. Each casino tends to have the same producers for these, and I doubt they get much traffic at all. Try selling to one of those producers though?

[betsec]

I don't consider any offers less than USD 30000, sorry. If any domain name booms in the industry of live casino in coming months, then this one. Remember my words

[Bizdo]

Before new gTLDs any Casino.anything domain was worth $1000 or more, even in completely unknown ccTLDs. I am not sure if you will get $30k, but if .live becomes popular $30k is something you should expect.