Why is this happening? Why am I missing out on great deals? The answer to it is simple: Because of all of the noise associated with auctions today. Simply put, there isn’t enough time in a day to scatter through all auction listings, especially where a majority of domains are extremely weak at best; do not have listed or expected prices attached, and are held by completely unmotivated sellers. Could some of the domains above have been sold for double those prices? Sure they could, if the auction house made sure to separate quality listings from non quality, then top buyers, those who value their time and have money to spend, would pay more attention.
The domain market desperately needs liquidity. If you bring quality sellers with quality inventory who wish to move their inventory quick (velocity driven) and filter through the inventory so quality buyers would not spend their valuable time scattering through weak inventory, then buyers will follow, pay closer attention, and gladly will vote YES by bidding more enthusiastically with their hard earned dollars.
This is the foundation of BIDO in a nutshell. BIDO is built on fixing market inefficiencies. We started with the release of DNZoom By Bido and will later today release a preview of our auction house and functionalities within at Bido.com. The overall picture, the BIDO team will try and fix inefficiencies in the marketplace, from domain management to auctions at the moment and later expand to other areas that need some attention.
More on Bido later today..
Sahar
There are rarely top premium domains for sale.
So it’s hard to distinguish acceptable domains for investors when they are melted with garbage.
This is what is happening and Sahar I am agree with you.
If you don’t take the time yourself to calculate the metrics of the domains for sale then you quickly lost your buying motivation.
I don’t know what you have in mind.
But we started 1 year ago this transparency work when we launched:
PremiumDomains.com and Mocus.com
In both marketplaces the visitor can see the term frequency and search popularity of domain names for sale, so hat help a lot to locate better names. Maybe you are planning to push transparency giving more metrics like PR, traffic, parking revenue, …
If that’s the case then Congrats because it can only benefit our industry.
Is there something wrong about the name, or did the buyer start to immediately use the domain name? weathershield.com resoves to a fully established website for a company which seems to hold a trademark for “weather shield”.
I agree. Honestly, I think that if Moniker shrunk its silent auction to 500 domains or even 1000 they’d get better results. Less sorting through crappy ones — it gives me a headache.
Looking forward to seeing what you plan with Bido
I donno Sahar…a place called Tao may have had something to do with you missing some names
Bido will be nice though letting people look at 1 name at a time.
Sahar
My buddy, weathershield.com had a strong trademark which really restricted the value.
SierraMadre.com was actively bid on.
If you don’t want to screw with going through the whole list you can just follow the names that are receiving bids and track them that way.
If you did that, you would have only seen the 268 names that sold and not the 3K other names that did not sell.
The only problem is that the auction goes for some 6-7 hours.
We picked up about 20 low priced names which we thought we good buys for resale purposes in the $300-$700 range.
Michael
There are a ton of factors that determine what makes a great domain, and the most important one to remember is that it is determined by The Buyer.
It is not only existing statistics and metrics that decide the fate of a domain. There are many buyers that look for domains that are ahead of the curve, reaching towards trends that few people are aware of. Buy now, develop, and in 6-12 months you are leading the industry.
I like to look at Google news and trends and see the amazing increase in news stories relating to some of my domains.
How many domainers are following nanotechnology? The next industry conference focuses on nano risk assessment. Imagine having the foresight to put that name in your auction (nanoriskassessment.com), actually announce it far enough in advance that the domain owner, their sales rep and listing agent have an opportunity to promote it to the industry. Imagine the opportunity for another domainer, who now has at least a week or two to research the industry and see the potential the domain has. Now you have an auction.
Not all great domains are natural type-ins, at least not yet..Can you see why a domain that is way too long, not a generic, no traffic because it’s not yet developed might have value?
Who is missing out on the 3D trend in gaming and movies? Nvidia the 3D graphics card maker is moving into mobile games.. Who owns 3Dgraphicscard.com, 3Dactiongame.com, 3Dapplication.com?(me)
Did anyone notice video ads making headline news with Google going to video ad auctions? Great time to own videoadauction.com or videoadprovider.com. Enough time to get them developed and going before everyone else…
Who creates interactive game ads? They should be interested in owning the search, but no takers yet…
My point is,there are tons of great names being submitted that are not being chosen for auction based on some old thinking, and outdated metrics. There needs to be more interaction between domain owners and their sales reps, and sales reps and the auction companies. Give me an excel spread sheet to fill out with some space to educate you about the domains I submit, and you might have less passes at auctions. Give us an auction catalogue, that is a catalogue, not a spread sheet. Let the domain owners provide links to resources that will sell their domain! Use some room on the screen at auctions to show a logo of the domain, a screenshot of the website if it is developed, maybe a couple lines of relevant text….
I am looking forward to seeing what Bido can do. I hope you will open it up to some brainstorming from outside the network.
Anyone remember when Afternic’s closing soon section was the Hotest auction venue around. I think it goes unnoticed too often these days.
I see a lot of good mid level names pass through at ridiculously low final bids. And those are sales because the reserve had to be met to be in that section. Look at this weekends listings. A one word dot net that can be used in either Banking/Drugs/Rehab at less than $130.00 at this time closing in less than 24 hours. A great Geo Wireless with only one bid of $100??? YourWiFi.com seems to be attracting a little traffic but still at only $240.00 As you can see these are not $100,000 names but ridiculous steals at those bids. And again RESERVES are met. They might actualy sell at those bids. wow! Read Afternic’s blog.
http://afternicdlsblog.com/2008/02/29/reminder-about-weekend-auctions/
Howard…they’re not ridiculously low…the public sets the current price…I think most domainers are aware of that page…imo it’s the ridiculously high prices being paid for crap that make those look low.
I am not sure if the issue is one of ‘liquidity’ as much as it is an issue of ‘volume’. If you think about it, you can relate this to almost any type of product one can view or purchase on the web (e.g., real estate, automobiles, etc.). Just imagine if you didn’t search ‘locally’ to narrow your search for that perfect used car within a 25 mile radius of where you lived to tried to find the best deal close to you?
Or, what if you had to search ALL the real estate MLS’s across the country to find the ‘best deal’ for your next home without narrowing your search to a particular county, town, city or neighborhood…imagine how daunting that task would be?!
I think that domain names suffer the same fate, but the trouble is, aside from geo-domains and/or limiting your criteria to ppc revenue type metrics, it’s very hard to narrow the list because there are so many domains available and much of the value of any domain (real value) is in the eye of the (potential) beholder.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately myself, as I too have seen some remarkable deals pass by and said to myself, if only I could have known that domain was available, I might have paid 2x - 5x what it sold for. Imagine how many other domains are being sold for less than what they could be sold for if there was some way to unify the DLSs…but even then, we still would have the trouble of sorting through all the domains available for sale….hmmmmm….I know there is an answer to this…I just don’t have the solution yet
just my 2 cents…
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Few years ago we were spending six figures a month amount buying domains via auction houses. For us, the main problem has been sorting through weak inventory, thousands of domains, sometimes, tens of thousands a day. We know from experience, the purchasing equation is bigger then domain pricing/traffic/potential. With the serious buyer, it includes invested time, auction house willingness and commitment to save you time. In the current marketplace there is no auction house which focuses on buyers needs to save time and sellers needs to move inventory quick. We plan to change that.
Cheers
Sahar
This service looks great, but I think domainers are missing on spanish language domain names, wich is a great market too.
We just launched our new free auction service at http://www.subastasdedominios.info and we get all kind of congratulation emails but buyers seem to be not really interested, why?
I think is better to invest your money in some spanish high quality domains instead of other low quality english domains like those found daily in ebay. (or even some poor quality LLLL.com)
Back to Bido: Please include some spanish names!
Thanks,
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We’ll include what we’ll be comfortable guaranteeing. Some Spanish names definitely fall into that category.
Cheers
Sahar
As a domain owner/seller, I love Kelly’s suggestions of sellers having enough advance time for promoting the upcoming name for auction to the appropriate industry. While Moniker does a great job putting together all the names for auction,there isn’t much time for a seller to do any advance marketing to that name-related industry. As a seller, I submit my names 3 months in advance, but only know a few weeks beforehand if it is selected for auction. This doesn’t leave much time for industry press releases, contacting prominent industry players, etc.
Thanks for your blog!
Best,
Abigail
(P.S. SyntheticDiamond.com–in the silent auction–was one of my and Maxam’s gem portfolio names. We also had DiamondNecklace.com in the live auction, but two weeks in advance certainly wasn’t enough time to do any real marketing.)