Earlier this week we launched The Domain Game for iOS. The free game shows you a random domain sale including the date and venue, and you have to guess the price range. We’ve already served up nearly 30,000 questions! In this post we announce the first winner of the weekly prize drawing, talk about some tips for playing the game, and more.

The First Prize Winner

Each week we’re going to be giving away a prize. To be eligible for the drawing you have to be a registered user in the game, not playing as a guest. Each correct answer you give during the week gets you one entry into the drawing. It’s that simple, the more you play the more chance you have of winning. Become a better investor and win free stuff!

We may change the prize from time to time, but for this drawing it was a free week-long featured listing on our site ($35 value). If you’re a domain industry company and would like to contribute some prizes like free months of membership, swag, cash, etc. please contact us.

Without further ado, the first prize winner is Ed Muller. Congratulations Ed! His winning ticket came from the question BlingBlings.com which sold for $3,800 on January 6, 2011 at Sedo. Ed answered 491 questions correctly during the week and is currently ranked #6 on our leader board with a longest streak of eight correct answers in a row.

Tips for Playing Better

The best advice I can give is to pay close attention to the date and the venue as it can have a big impact on the price of the domain. The market changes over time and each venue is unique. Below I’ll give you some specific examples.

LLL.com sales have fluctuated pretty wildly. Towards the end of 2014 up until now, it is very rare to see a three-letter .com sale below five figures. But if the date was before then, the answer might be four figures. If it is really old it could even be three figures. Watch the date and learn when things changed. The LLL.com market was hot up until 2008/2009 and then it took a pretty big dip until 2014, when Chinese letters started being more valuable.

Adjust up or down for the venue. An average quality domain at GoDaddy or Flippa might have sold for three figures, while one at Sedo or BuyDomains probably sold for four figures, and one at DomainNameSales or MostWantedDomains probably went for five figures. Consider whether the venue is wholesale or retail and adjust accordingly. Sedo is a really tough venue to gauge because they have a good mix of both wholesale and retail sales.

Changes to Scoring and Skill Rating

When we first launched the game, the points system was simple. You got +4 for a correct answer and -1 for an incorrect answer. Thanks to some input from Nat Cohen we’ve changed it to a system that better reflects your skill and makes it harder to get a really high score.

Now a correct answer gets you +2 points. The penalty for an incorrect answer now depends on how wrong you were. If you were off by one order of magnitude (i.e. saying $xxx for an $x,xxx sale) you lose one point, two orders of magnitude off costs you three points, and three orders of magnitude off costs you 10 points. We recalculated everyone’s score based on the new system, so if you saw your points drop that is why.

We also added the Skill rating to the leader board. The skill rating is the average number of points you gained per 100 questions answered, so it is out of a total of 200 possible points. We implemented this so players can have a better idea of how they stack up against others.

Consider this: two players could have the exact same score, one who didn’t play much but got most of the answers correct, and one who played a lot but was much less accurate. Without the skill rating they would look exactly the same. But in the scenario above the first player would have a really high skill rating while the second player would have a very average rating.

The skill rating and the longest streak get you the bragging rights 🙂

Stay Tuned

That’s all for now. We’ll keep you posted with the winners of new drawings, and try to release some interesting stats like the question players struggled with the most, questions everyone got right, which price ranges are the trickiest to peg, which venues are the most unpredictable, and more.

I hope you’re enjoying the game! I’ve been playing it a lot and I’m noticeably better than when I started, so I think it really works as a training tool even for people who have been around the industry for a while.

If you haven’t downloaded it already, click here to get it from the Apple app store. It’s free and doesn’t require registration so you have nothing to lose.