I talked with my business partners about whether to sell table.com to the individual who emailed me with the offer.  We didn't have any real way to evaluate whether $50,000 was an appropriate price for the domain, so we decided to spend some time looking into the other alternatives.

Some of the possibilities we thought about were auctions, listing services, soliciting potential buyers ourselves or using a broker, but we didn't know enough about any of these (yet) to make an informed decision.  Maybe we shouldn't sell the domain at all...  The number of people online grows every day, so perhaps it would be worth more at a later date?

There is much research ahead, so I will keep notes here.

Time is moving too quickly again.

I'm starting to think that we may be able to get more than $50,000 for table.com (though I'd still like some more reliable data), and that we should pursue a different strategy, but I still haven't had much time to figure out what that strategy should be. 

I've only just begun to investigate, when I discover that two of the more promising candidates -- Moniker's T.R.A.F.F.I.C. auction and Domain Roundtable's auction, which I will describe presently -- both have urgently impending deadlines.  The submission deadline for Domain Roundtable's 8/15 auction is 8/6.  The deadline for Moniker's October Miami auction is even earlier -- 8/1 -- though they've offered me a couple of days extension, since Moniker's staff is all going to be busy at another big auction.

Still, since I hadn't even really considered getting into an auction until just a few days ago, this all seems to be moving a bit fast!

The domain listing services didn't seem like the right venue for a premium domain.  We worried that potential buyers would have a hard time finding us, and we didn't really know what the right price to charge was!

For this reason, the auction model was appealing, but -- of the online auctions -- only Sedo's new "premium domains" auction had any real attraction for me.  The others didn't seem like the right venue for a high profile domain.  The offline domain auctions of Moniker and Domain Roundtable, despite being kind of a backward way to sell online property, were clearly higher profile events where some qualified buyers might congregate.

Moniker has a good grip on the premium domain aftermarket, accounting for close to half of the sales on DN Journal's 2007 list.  They are the big player in the industry.

On the other hand, Domain Roundtable has some fantastic ideas about how to make the industry even better.  I love adding the live component to the auction -- which would make it much easier for entities who aren't professional domainers, who might have a legitimate real-world use for a good domain to buy the domain of interest to them -- , and wish Moniker had something like this.  I liked their transparency, too.

But, there were just too many unknowns about Domain Roundtable's auction -- as a first time occurrance -- to pull the trigger.  I also took Domain Roundtable's suggestion that we submit what seemed like a lowish reserve (in comparison with Moniker, which didn't immediately flinch), as a sign of lack of confidence in their ability to pull in the big numbers.

We chose Moniker's auction.

Note: We didn't have time to fully investigate the domain broker model, which I think might have been a very good fit for us, because I think a person actively pursuing leads might have been able to find some very qualified buyers.  Unfortunately, I didn't know any domain brokers, and the time constraints made it difficult to find out enough to be truly comfortable.  If I had another week or two to make up my mind, this is where I would have spent my time.

 

(Updated September 21, 2007)

I believe, once again, that table.com is going to be included in Moniker's T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Miami auction, though we haven't received any real official notification.  It would be nice if Moniker were a little more transparent!

I'm sure this would have been more useful a couple weeks ago when I first requested it from Moniker, but here are the  "officially sanctioned" instructions, if you're interested in bidding on table.com:

Table.com will be part of Moniker's T.R.A.F.F.I.C. East domain auction on Friday, October 12.  Absentee and Telephone Proxy bidding are available. If you're interested in being part of the auction, please visit the Moniker website (www.Moniker.com) or contact Howard Kopp at hkopp@moniker.com.