While to others it might sound like you are taking a hit my guess is that you simply got a good enough number that you decided not to go for door number two. Which could be 5 years down the road or never.
The market for this type of name is basically the following:
a) A non chinese domain investor (good luck getting anything north of 350k from one of those).
b) A chinese investor (in which case all bets are off after all they buy numeral domains for ridiculous amounts). I've sold to a ton of these guys.
c) A startup (but not going to pay a million for a domain).
d) Some company that needs those initials.
e) Some major company that needs a brand name. And hopefully doesn't have a trademark but has a budget.
As such (as we both know) you can wait forever for the right person or company to come along. So if someone throws you a million(s) for the name you are going to think long and hard about not taking the money.
And the fact that, say, some billion dollar company wants it doesn't mean they will part with millions to buy it.
Anyway congratulations.
This has been a long time in the works (years), and it's been an interesting but sometimes tiring affair. The obvious candidates to buy it have all had their chance, compared to what other 2L domains have sold for I think my asking price was quite reasonable. I think I understand why this particular party bought it and what their strategy is, so I understand the deal from the buyers perspective in so far as this is possible.
For my side the short version of the story is risk/return analysis, I've made a good bit of money from the exploitation of the domain, I could have kept it and re-targeted it to some new purpose or sell it outright and re-invest the proceeds in some other way. Domains are a fickle thing, you're always operating by the grace of some other party.
Another way to look at this transaction is that the sale of the domain instantly brought about 20 years worth of revenues without the associated costs.
I've got many other reasons for selling, after all, a two letter domain is 'just 16 bits' and I think bits have in the end limited utility, as a brand it was useful but not spectacularly so. Though no doubt someone else could have milked it for much more (for instance, by making it a porn site). I'm fairly tired of the whole webcam concept (no matter what you do, it tends to trend to a porn site unless you feel like babysitting it 24x7) and have been very busy with other concepts in the last couple of months.
The Due-Diligence work is also quite demanding, letting this go to me was not hard once the decision was made. I will miss my ultra-short email address.
I'll do what I can to keep the users happy and the site up in the air, the deserve nothing less, their loyalty over the years has been astounding.
As far as "20 years worth of revenues" I had a domain related to the mortgage business where I was offered an amount of money that was, let's call it, 4 years worth of revenues. This was in iirc 2006/7 prior to the crash when those terms were paying tons of money. After the crash literally no income worth mentioning. Obviously in retrospect wish I had taken the offer. But at the time it didn't seem like the mortgage landscape downside would be anywhere near what it turned out to be.
The new tlds, the fact that the domain name system as such is expanding all the time and that urls are fewer and fewer typed in makes me believe that 'shortness' is not so much a factor today as it was in the early days. You can get a two letter (not .com) for very little money.
The LG deal still baffles me, though I can see with that being their brand they probably had little choice. But no company is literally called 'ww', not even mine (It is Camarades BV) so from that point of view a really large figure was probably not going to happen any time soon.
The big difference is whether you approach the buyer or whether the buyer approaches you.
"A price is never right, if you sold it was too cheap, if you didn't it was too expensive.". I'm happy with this sale, it's a ton of money and since I normally live without a safety net this will help a lot with my sleeping disorder.
That Icann announcement of a trademark dispute, fake infringement suit (it's been tried), DHS seizure and all these other bad things that can happen to domains worry me a lot less today than they did yesterday.
Having a 'nice' phone number was really important at some point, easy to remember. Now we all have address books.
The DNS is nice, it works well and I'm sure that it will continue to work well for a long time. But gtlds are the same as area codes and I have absolutely no idea what having an area code of '1' would mean for a business that is not in the United States.
.coms used to be pretty much the standard, I see many more people launching more and more successful businesses on non .com domains. Given enough time (ok, probably a lot) the weight of a .com will likely reduce to the point where it is just another identifier. Maybe we'll all be scanning QR codes, maybe browsers will in fact hide the domain, maybe at some point you'll never type on in again.
I'm not saying the DNS will die completely, I just think that the length of a domain will not be as important any more. But if you brand happens to be LL then you'd better have LL.com, that probably is a given for the foreseeable future. Weight Watchers, World Wildlife Foundation and World Wrestling are obvious contenders but even they were not interested. So now some Chinese company will run with it, I'm curious how they will fare and what they will do with it.
For me a domain is a requirement, just like hosting is a requirement. Camarades.com became an instant hit and it was very hard to spell. Google wasn't even a proper word before it was used as a brand (they miss-spelled googol) and now it is almost a verb. Facebook is an ugly juxtaposition of two otherwise unrelated words. If ww.guru is your thing and wwguru.com is free then for the $10 or so you really should just take it. But if the .com is taken just ignore it and find another one. In the end a domain is an identifier, it is the service behind it that matters most. So if you plan on starting an escrow service it helps if you can obtain escrow.com. But if you can't I would not worry about it, there are tons of options.
I've yet to see a service succeed just on the strength of the domain, and I've seen plenty of services with great domains fail. A good domain can help but will not be the defining factor of a success.
Attempt to sell them. That's the only way you can establish the value of anything.
One easy way to get an idea is by looking at recent transactions for similar domains (do not look at the asking prices, they are typically not realistic).
> And secondly how do I go about finding buyers?
There are many ways to attract buyers, advertising, auctions, brokers, messages on the domain itself, a blog post. Whatever you feel is required.
If people are approaching you to buy them that is one indicator of value.
In general domains are a numbers game. If you own a large quantity of decent names you might sell 1% of them a year. Whether you get a good number totally depends on how you do the negotiation that's a huge factor.
In general it's pretty difficult to outbound sell domains especially if you don't know the business to be able to size up and potential buyers.