Dead Domain

I let another one of my original eBay affiliate domains die this week.

It had been online since 2009 and was one of my first affiliate sites that worked, getting a sales cut from eBay items purchased if people clicked through. It was in the antiques niche, covering a specific type of Japanese pottery and, although the site was quite small, it did bring quite a few visitors every month. I even partnered with an online antiques valuation service, getting a small affiliate return for people using their service via my link, until they went out of business and didn’t pay me what I was owed.

However, the majority of those people were looking for free help identifying their own pottery, asking if it was a genuine piece and how much it was worth. I had added a WordPress plugin to allow people to upload an image with their comment, so the site was rife with users crappy photographs.

It was clear that people weren’t even reading the content I had written on the pages, as it would have clearly told them that their piece of Japanese pottery with “MADE IN CHINA” stamped on the bottom wasn’t a valuable antique.

Like some of my other old affiliate sites, I just built it around an underserved niche topic. I came across this one by accident whilst using some research tools and jumped in. It fit the criteria of people regularly searching for it on Google and lots of items on eBay that were selling. I even went to the local library and found books on the topic to make notes and tried to learn as much as I could to provide good content to my readers. I even started to learn Japanese numbers and Kanji to help people identify the markings on their pieces and spent hours on sites like this, trying to decipher markings.

In the end, I just got tired of people asking questions and then slagging me off for not answering them in a timely manner. Luckily, other websites in the same niche started to collate long listings of the individual markings and styles, so I usually just referred people there. It didn’t stop them posting images on my site, or emailing me to ask for help still though.

If I go to an antiques shop, I still look at the Japanese pottery and look under the vases and bowls at the markings. I don’t know many marks off-by-hand, but I can spot a real item from a fake.

I will most likely let all of my other sites like this one die off as they come up for the domain renewal. I just don’t have the energy to maintain them any longer and they don’t really earn me any money. It will interesting to see if anyone picks up the domain in the coming months, not that it has a very good backlink profile.