Translate.com with 2million monthly visitors on auction at Flippa (no reserve)

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Translate.com is up on auction at Flippa and is currently at $201,000. This is a no reserve auction and is also a real business built on a premium domain name.

Where do you think it closes?

 

Translate.com: almost 2M monthly visitors, Translation website with ~2M monthly visitors generating $469k annual revenue

Premium domain and translation site servicing nearly 2m monthly visitors and generating revenues of USD 400,000 in the 9 months to September 30th. The current owner invested a lot of time and resources on the front end to develop systems that automate the bulk of daily… Read more

 

About Raymond Hackney

Raymond is a writer, domain trader and consultant based in Pennsylvania. Raymond is the founder of 3Character.com and TLDInvestors.com.

Comments

  2. Eric Borgos says

    It seems like a great site to buy, mainly because even if the business turns out not to be that good, the domain could probably be sold with no content at all for more than the auction price (assuming it is low).

    • tfw says

      What will you estimate is a fair (and realistic) market value for the name with out the business?

      • Eric Borgos says

        I would say a price of $2 million would be fair for the domain only. But, it is possible it could sell for double that if Google, Microsoft, or Facebook bought it.

        • tfw says

          Thanks – It would be interesting to know what she has acquired it for – She takes a big chance selling without reserve, I hope she get a decent price

  4. John says

    No reserve? That’s a bit crazy. Sad, will be surprised if it doesn’t hurt the cause in a big way. Domains like this should be appearing in auctions at places like Sotheby’s.

  5. Matt says

    I’d be weary. I see lots of new bidders in this auction. There is very little verification. This is wide open to shill bidding. How can Flippa verify the authenticity of the bids? This is too large of a domain name / sale to be in one of these types of auctions with little to no authenticity behind the bidding. Not saying there is shill bidding nor blaming the seller. I’m skeptical of the Flippa system is all.

  6. Matt says

    Have lots of questions –

    1. Authenticity of the bidders. Seems to be no way to verify the bidders and this auction is wide open to shill bidding.

    2. Broker/Listing Agent – seems not too responsive. Messaged her hours ago with a few questions. You’d think for a high profile domain/business of this nature you’d get a response within minutes.

    3. Broker/Listing Agent again – only 50K in transactions total on Flippa? Don’t know who she is but that doesn’t seem like a lot in sales to be listing this type of domain/site.

    4. Seller – why selling it when the revenues/profits are up? No explanation given on why revenues have spiked.

    5. Employee count – something is quite off here. It says 1 employee and costs are too low for such a business. Again, no way to actually verify any of this. The owner isn’t a developer is he? Something is quite off.

    The whole thing is very suspicious tbh.

    • Joshua Schoen says

      Matt, you’re right, the listing broker isn’t the best at responding in a timely manner. It took her 4 days to send me the P&L after I requested it and gave her my email to send it to. If you haven’t seen the P&L I highly suggest you request it, even if you don’t plan on bidding. It’s worth looking at.

      All I’ll say is that the financial data that the listing is showing as net profit is not actually net profit. It’s gross income. Huge difference. Very misleading. Flippa needs to be called out for this. It’s not right and it doesn’t sit well with me.

      Despite all this, Translate.com is a very fine and valuable domain name.

      • Matt says

        Received info from them. You’re right. The issue is not the owner nor the business. Issue is with Flippa/Flippa listing. Once we received the info, everything immediately made sense.

        Flippa needs to make some updates IMO.

  7. Matt says

    There’s probably tons of developers working on this in the past. Going to EmergeMedia.com shows jobs mos of them for developers. There’s probably 10+ people worked on this actively at same time. DEFINITELY NOT 1 person.

    There needs to be transparency into this listing otherwise it is outright fraud.

  8. Matt says

    Sorry for the million posts. But bidding on this all you’re getting is a domain IMO. Bid if you’re going in knowing you’ll come out with $0 revenue potentially. Again, in MY opinion.

    There’s almost nothing in terms of due dilegence / information to back it up as a business sale.

  9. Eric Borgos says

    I did a Google search on the broker (Amber Burke) and she actually works for Flippa and has a lot of experience in the domain sales business. I did not know Flippa had an internal team of brokers.

    • Matt says

      I’ve called her phone, wrote her texts, left her voicemail, sent her 3 messages. Still no response. Terrible.

  12. David M says

    A few comments suggest that Google should buy this, but another domain one would think they would want is Maps.com. But they (or Apple or Microsoft) haven’t touched it even though they could surely afford it. So far I believe that Google is perfectly happy with their domain setup for their translate and Google Map services. And people know to go to each; it’s easy enough to bookmark them.

    On another note, from a technical viewpoint, Translate.com isn’t near as good at translating or have as many languages as Google. I had never even heard of it until today. It’s surely valuable, but so are a lot of generics, (Music.com, Pizza.com, etc) many of which have little if any truly useful content, and haven’t sold to any big-name companies. Guess it’s all just a waiting game; sometimes a long one.

  13. domain guy says

    Translate could be purchased by IAC just like it purchased dictionary.com was purchased. Two million monthly visitors could easily be used for built in advertising. adding value to any portal.This back end could be updated by an Indian translation firm… There are many possibilities. And focus is not only on the domain it will be a functioning website that translates.Eventually AI will support the total backend and monthly net revenues will rise.
    AS for the broker it appears she is the wrong broker. Four days to respond to a listing? No outgoing marketing reach? Suppose some blockchain operator purchased this domain and built and monetized a block chain?

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