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:

• 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.
• 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."

Where do people go to sell domain names online?  Obviously, they could do it on eBay (which I've read about anecdotally in the newspaper), but where else are domains sold?

It appears that there are a number of online auction sites which focus on selling domains, the primary domain aftermarkets" seem to be:

• Afternic
• GoDaddy
• GreatDomains/Sedo.com
• and eBay

GoDaddy is an internet domain registrar and web hosting company founded in 1997.

It became the largest domain registrar (passing Network Solutions) in April 2005, and later launched what now appears to be the highest volume aftermarket exchange.

It may not be appropriate for the premium domain market, though.  Keither Pieper, a senior analyst at domain name research company Zetetic, says in this press release, "GoDaddy's sale transactions are likely casual sellers who happen to register their names with GoDaddy, casually willing to sell at any price."

According to Zetetic's December 2005 data, GoDaddy had the lowest average sale price of the major online exchanges, where the average sale was for about $692 (Sedo was the leader at $2,558, followed by Afternic at $1,072), though they were a relatively new player at that time.

An acronym for "Search Engine for Domain Offers," Sedo is one of the leading online domain aftermarketplaces, with the world's largest database of domain names (over 8 million domains listed for sale).

When Sedo.com acquired GreatDomains in June (for a reported $2 million) to boost their presence in the higher end of the domain market, they kicked off a monthly week-long online live auction of premium domains.   The most recent auction, ending August 23, sold 22 domains, including lifts.com (67,000), dental.net and queries.com (both $21,500).

According to Zetetic's December 2005 data, Sedo had the highest average sale price of the major online exchanges, and I bet the premium auction has further boosted this.

For a quick summary of Sedo's process and fees (as well as comparison with Afternic), see this Domains Magazine article about Selling Domains: Domain Aftermarkets.

eBay is far and away the United States' biggest online auction community. But that doesn't necessary mean that they are dominant in the field of domain name auctions.

Do people buy and sell domains on eBay?

They clearly do!  There were several thousand domains for sale when I visited eBay's .com domains auction page.  And people did appear to be looking at the details (though how they could make sense of them, I don't know) -- closing auctions tended to have had 50 or even hundreds of page views, though most domains bid prices weren't very close to the admittedly starry-eyed "buy now" prices.

 Unfortunately, the site was such a mess that I couldn't imagine a lot of people finding the good domains there.  And the whole experience made me feel a little sleazy, so ultimately I didn't feel comfortable doing this with table.com.

Here is something you might want to check out if you do go down this road:

• Auction Domains on eBay - The Complete Guide

One of the longest-established domain exchanges, Afternic remains one of the two largest domain exchanges.  Afternic was bought by Register.com in 2000, then sold after the .com crash in 2002 to a company known as NameBuySell.

According to Zetetic's December 2005 data, Afternic's average sale was for about $1,072, between GoDaddy and Sedo.

For a quick summary of Afternic's process and fees (as well as comparison with Sedo), see this Domains Magazine article about Selling Domains: Domain Aftermarkets.

According to Zetetic's December 2005 data, Sedo had the highest average sale price of the major online exchanges, where the average sale was for about $2,558, followed by Afternic at $1,072 and GoDaddy was at $692.  The anecdotal evidence also seems to say that though GoDaddy is getting good volume, it doesn't seem appropriate marketplace for premium-type domains.

This Domains Magazine article about Selling Domains: Domain Aftermarkets is a nice summary of the fees and procedures at the two other major exchanges, Afternic & Sedo.  In our case, the difference in fees weren't particularly significant, since we were hoping to sell the domain for quite a bit more than $100.

Domain Rookie, who despite his name appears to have a relatively substantial portfolio, has the following post listing where he is selling his names.

I was excited to hear that the first Domain Roundtable Conference turned out well, and that there will be more coming.

1,200 online participants;  300 live audience, what they call the "most viewers of any domain auction ever."  Despite what was clearly a pretty big success, Jay has lots of good ideas for making the next auction even better, including fewer domains, a better live experience, easier to get food & drink, better live chat, and more!  I love the energy and transparency!

First DomainTools Live Auction Results

Total sales were apparently $3,841,528.  Top sales included Invention.com ($500,000), Rebate.com & Rebates.com ($1,000,000), MakeMoneyOnline.com ($95,000), AZ.com ($500,000), Army.org ($99,000), ConsumersGuide.com ($66,750), Cab.com ($110,000), Copies.com ($90,000), FederalStudentLoans.com ($50,750), Event.com ($165,000).

Domain Name Journal reviews the conference.  Sahar at The Conceptualist reviews the Roundtable, too.  And Adam Strong (Domain Name News) makes some very interesting comments in the posting "domain roundtable scorecard."

I've gotten two requests from Moniker to lower the reserve for table.com, the first from my sales rep, and the second from Monte Cahn, their CEO.

It was fun to correspond with Monte, who's sort of domain space royalty (between his companies and the Domain Masters online radio talk show).  But this reserve lowering stuff is a disappointment -- I chose Moniker in part because I felt Domain RoundTable was pushing me towards too low a reserve. 

I'm beginning to  get the uncomfortable feeling -- from my experience and anecdotal evidence -- that everybody does this.  Reserve lowering may just be a consequence of the form of the domain market and how the major auctions do business. 

Domain sale information is asymmetric.  Above and beyond the possibility that the auction house may have better price expectations that the average seller, they certainly know more about the number and quality of potentially targeted buyer prospects who will be attending the auction than the seller does, which is not in their interest to share.  They know more about their negotiations with multiple sellers than the sellers know about them, so they are in a better position to negotiate their wishes into reality.

The auction house has several incentives to ask everyone to lower their reserves (regardless of whether the price is right), so that it can get credit for any "bidding wars" that occur, and so that it can market its auction to more paying attendees.  Secondly, a lower reserve minimizes the risk that the auction's domains won't sell.  That's a big risk for an auction that limits, but less so for a seller who is willing to wait for the right buyer.

On the other hand, domain exchanges probably do know more about the most likely sales prices than many domain sellers, who from first-hand experience I can say frequently have unrealistic or inaccurate expectations, so in some cases this is really a valuable service for all involved!  Since domains don't typically sell a bunch of times in quick succession, it's hard to say.

What do you think?