WebGrow, Inc., is offering for sale a portfolio of domain names pertaining to the vehicles market in Mexico that would confer an ongoing, powerful strategic advantage and revenue generator to any vehicle manufacturer that deploys them effectively.

The portfolio will be sold only as a set, so there can be only one buyer.

That buyer will be either your own company, or a competitor.

We have engaged the services of [Name of Domain Name Brokerage] as a broker to negotiate the sale on our behalf.  Please direct all communications through them.

This document presents the domains and also their advantages to a vehicle maker or dealer.

Thank you.

— Keith Borden, Co-Owner
     WebGrow, Inc.

For 39 terms related to selling vehicles in Mexico, we have a total of 108 domains with .MX, .COM.MX and .COM extensions, distributed as follows.

With nearly 200 countries in the world, there's lots of places you could invest your resources in order to expand your market.  Why should Mexico be high on your list?

First, there’s Mexico’s population and economy . . .

• Mexico is the 10th most populous country in the world [about 130 million].  It is one of the world's largest economies and a firmly established upper-middle income country.  It has the 15th largest nominal GDP and is the 11th largest by purchasing power parity.  The economy is strongly linked to that of the United States. Mexico in 2018 was the 6th most visited country in the world with 39 million international arrivals.

Mexico is primarily a Spanish-speaking country, so are English keyword domain names  a mismatch? No.  You need to know the extent to which people in Mexico now use English.

• As of 2017, it is estimated that 1.2 million foreigners have settled in Mexico....  The vast majority of migrants come from the United States (900,000), making Mexico the top destination for U.S. citizens abroad.

Generic (non brand) vehicle domain names matter for several reasons.

• Customers begin their vehicle shopping online.  You may want them to go to a physical dealership, but they’ll go to a website first.  So you need to send them to a website.
• When you advertise on radio, TV or a billboard, and you want to send people to a website, you can’t give them a link to click.  You have to give them a URL, a domain.
• Then they have to remember it.  Customers easily remember a name that fits what they’re looking for —new car / chochenuevo, or electric trucks / camioneselectricos).
• Of course you need a domain and website for your brand or company.  Customers will go there if you’re what they’re looking for.  But you need to catch those who aren’t sure too.
• Customers may begin with an online search.  Then when they see what they searched for as a domain in the search results, they know that site is exactly what they’re looking for.
• An exact match domain with a major extension (.COM or else the local country’s extension (.MX or .COM.MX in Mexico) says you own the territory — you were quick enough, smart enough or big enough to capture the preeminent domain for that market.
• With strong generic (non brand) domains, you could take business away from your competitors.  But if a competitor owned them, they could use them to take business away from you. It’s worth owning the domains just to prevent competitors from doing that.

The vehicle domain names in this set offer several powerful advantages.

• They provide near-blanket coverage of the vehicle-sale territory in both English and  Spanish. Spanish is the national language, of course. But the best customers, those who are online with money to spend, are those most likely to know and use English.
• Customers wanting a new vehicle often search for “new [vehicle type]”. That’s covered.
• Customers wanting the best vehicle often search for “best [vehicle type]”. That’s covered.
• Customers wanting a vehicle sale often search for “[vehicle type] sale”. That’s covered.
• With these generic domains, the whole country is covered. A customer going to a domain can be directed to what’s relevant to them locally. This saves on advertising costs.

There are also advantages to having both the .MX and .COM.MX domain extensions (“TLDs”).

• Being the Internet country code top-level domain for Mexico, .MX has a very catchy and memorable slogan saying ".MX es la nueva forma de decir Mexico", which in English sounds like ".MX is the new way to say Mexico". Its second-level TLD .COM.MX is intended for commercial websites....

This set has over 100 domains.  Will you be using them all at once?  Probably not.  Do you even need them all for your own use?  Probably not.  But that’s not the point.

The point of getting the whole set is fourfold:

• You can use any of the domains when you need them, now and forever.
• As long as you have them, competitors can’t use them. Ever.
• The set allows you a degree of blanket coverage that competitors can’t match.
• This gives you a permanent competitive edge that can’t be duplicated. Ever.

Imagine a football game where the opposing team has a very powerful player — but because of their penalties, he’s their only player still on the field.  Your own team can very easily run around him.  However, a whole team that’s as strong as that player can be very hard to beat.

Similarly, if you had a couple of the domains in this set, competitors could very easily “run around you” with comparable domains.  But if you got the whole set, you wouldn’t be leaving power on the field for your competitors to pick up.  That would make you much harder to beat.

Ø  But if a competitor got the whole set, they could beat you with it, and they would be harder for you to beat.  Forever.

One company that’s smart enough to understand this will gain the massive leverage this advantage provides.  Only one company, because we will not break up the set.

The advantages of deploying a set of domains, rather than a single site or just a few, are many.

• Each site tells customers they’re in exactly the right place for what they’re looking for.
• Each site can be customized with both images and text to match its unique focus.
• Each site can link to all the others in a tightly integrated network — either with redirects (if the theme is exactly the same) or with links (if they’re different) — making customer navigation among them easy or seamless while impressing with your broad reach.
• The mutual linking in a tightly integrated network will help enormously with SEO, since the traffic to each site will boost the search engine ranking of all the sites.

These network advantages make it imperative that all these domains be kept together as a set.  Deployed as an integrated set, the domains will become strongly synergistic: the whole will be much, much greater than the sum of its parts.  So again . . .

Ø  We will not break up the set by selling some domains to one company, some to another.  This assures you that we won’t dilute the advantage of owning them — or dilute the disadvantage of not owning them. 

The full advantage will go to one buyer.

The full disadvantage will go to all of that buyer’s competitors.

All the vehicle companies in Mexico could benefit, but only one will.  All the rest will be hurt.

Frankly, any one or two of these domains, by themselves, would be something you could probably afford to ignore.  But not the set.  The set covers too much ground. It’s a must-have.

In a competitive bidding situation, how much should you be prepared to pay for this domain set?

You might think to turn to domain appraisal services for answers.  They could appraise each of the domains, add them up and give you a number for the total.  A sophisticated service might even add in something for the synergistic effect of a set.  This seems like an obvious approach.

But it would be a major mistake.  It’s important to understand why the appraisal services would get it wrong, so you don’t lose the set to a more savvy competitor.

Domain appraisal sites valuate domains based on sales of domains they consider similar.  But who bought those other domains?  And for what purpose?

There are two types of domain buyers:

• Domain investors (“domainers”):  Parties (like WebGrow) that purchase domains
  as an investment, hoping to resell them at a profit — often to other domainers.
• End users:  Parties (in this case, insurance companies) that purchase domains
  to use as an integral part of their business.

Since domainers are buying to resell, they try to buy at bargain prices.  These push the average market price for similar domains downward, and that affects appraisal service valuations.

What appraisal services don’t take into account, and can’t, is all the factors that contribute to the profit potential of this domain set for your company if you own it, as well as the loss potential for your company if a competitor owns it instead.

Only your own company has the information necessary to estimate these two factors, which are unique to your company because they are different for every company.  How could the not be?

Savvy end users valuate domains on a different basis.  They ask two critical questions:

• How much additional profit can I expect to make if I deploy this asset effectively?
• How much business can I expect to lose if a competitor deploys this asset effectively?

Of course, in the case of a set, these questions need to be asked for the set as a whole, bearing in mind the synergistic effect of deploying the domains as an integrated network, as well as the effect of having close to blanket coverage while depriving competitors of the same.

So for an end user, the criteria by which domainers valuate domains, as well as any appraisals based on market prices, are completely irrelevant.  Instead, all that’s relevant is an estimation of the impact that owning the domains, or not owning them, could have on their business.

For more on valuating domain names, please see articles 13-23 in the author’s Linkedin article series, What Businesses Need to Know about Domaining:

Mexico is a complicated country with a complicated history.  Any generalizations made “from 30,000 feet” — especially by an outsider — are bound to distort issues that certain people feel strongly about for very legitimate reasons. 

In writing this overview — for the benefit of a select audience, for a very specific purpose —  I made my best effort to be accurate and objective within the confines of brevity.  Please forgive any distortions or biases which nevertheless inadvertently found their way into my words.  I encourage you to do your own research, to correct any inaccuracies herein.