Domain Roundtable Conference - Domaining for Amateurs: The True Story of Selling a Domain Name
Domain Roundtable Conference
This new entrant has some great ideas for imroving the domain aftermarket auction process. Most importantly, the event combines a "live" real-world auction (which has been shown to bring in a targeted professional domainer audience of likely bidders) with a simultaneous online auction, which can potentially open the bidding to a very large potential audience interested in individual names. In comparison with Moniker's auctions, the domain selection process was quite transparent. Other details included:
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Flat 10% commission from the seller (less than many other auction houses like Moniker charge). "Only" 450 domains (though this seems like a pretty large number) in the auction. All of them are purportedly "high value" domains -- valued at more than $5,000 by DomainTools staff, a free part of the submission process.
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No long contract. Jay Westerdal says "We are not going to lock people into contracts for months. This should be a free market so people are free to come an go after the auction is over and no one bid on the domain." By the way, high reserve domains do have signed contracts.
Drawbacks
- This was DR's first conference & live auction, so I couldn't assess who would actually attend, or how things would likely go.
- Similarly, some of the systems were being built on the fly, so there were lots of bugs, which tend to make me anxious. Admittedly, many of the systems were updated based on user comments (which is excellent!), but still it didn't project the highest quality image.
- The first couple of rounds of the "top domains" list didn't look very appealing. On the other hand, the transparency was awesome, and there were some good last-minute entrants (here is the final list)!
- They wanted us to have a lowish? ($25k) reserve. DR only wanted a limited number of $100,000+ reserve domains. Jay's argument is that "The Reserve should be set so that multiple bidders want to go after the domain. By setting the first bid at close to or above a retail price the domain will not sell. So it will not be picked to be in the auction if the reserve stays that high." And Jay was very helpful in trying to suggest good reserves for the domains of many, many submitters. But there we had some concern that they had a biased reason to get good domains into the auction with low reserves, so it would look like they caused a "bidding war."
Categories
Domain Auction Sites , Professional Help , Real-World Domain Auctions0 TrackBacks
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