DomainTools Auction Sells $30,000 in Domains
Thursday, January 10th, 2008
Bidders absent during online live auction.
DomainTools‘ January auction has concluded with lackluster results. Based on sales completed during the live portion of the auction, I calculate $31,800 in sales with a median price of $1,000. Domains are still available for purchase, however, and the number will increase before everything is said in done. Already a couple late bids have been received.
So what went wrong?
1. It was put together too late. The call for domains was sent out December 5, less than a month before the auction was originally scheduled to end.
2. The list of domains was released only a week before the auction was scheduled to end.
3. The auction was originally scheduled to occur when many people were still on vacation (January 3). It was then extended to today.
4. The seller agreement required sellers to allow DomainTools to sell the domains at a discount after the auction. Smart bidders will just wait until after the auction to buy assuming no one else was bidding on the domains. They just had to watch the auction, and if no one else bid then let the domain auction expire and buy it at a discount afterward.
5. There weren’t many good names and reserves seemed high.
The highest sale is BuilderLoans.com at $8,000.
I had a little difficulty when I started watching the auction today. It seemed that after the first several auctions it “refreshed” and began the first auction again. I tried it in a couple browsers and had the same problem, but then it started working a bit later.
DomainTools is planning another auction for February. I hope it decides to delay it to provide more lead time.
The next industry live auction is SnapNames Live at the upcoming DomainFEST. The preliminary list for this auction looks solid, with name such as neighborhood, bookmarks.com, soapoperas.com, and face.com. Hopefully the reserves will be reasonable; we’ll find out soon.
Further Reading:
- DomainTools Announces Next Auction
- AZ.com Gets $500k Bid Ahead of Auction, Rebate(s).com Sells for $1.0M
- GeoDomains Auction Sells $480,000 Domains
Tags: domain auction, domaintools, SnapNames
Yeah, I scanned through the list of domains available for auction and thought there weren’t many good names also.
Kudos to Jay for showing some humility on this. He just posted a blog post with his lessons learned. Among them:
-Pick better domains
-Pick better domains
-Good domains will always sell
That sums it up
http://blog.domaintools.com/2008/01/domaintools-live-auction-recap/
The more auctions that occur, the better they will become as auction sponsors learn through trial and error how to expand the audience of buyers and provide a better event. It’s overwhelmingly clear that quality name selection in any auction is a critical ingredient. Failure to properly screen for high interst names is a major drawback.
There are several plateaus of success not yet achieved relating to widescale marketing and promotion of the auctions. A press release and banner ad on a few websites is not sufficient to reach the larger buyers.
Re #3
This is true. But even if this auction had better domains, I still think it’s important for all auctions to have sufficient lead time.
One important point missed I think, whatever your opinion is on registrant search and/or Jay , a lot goodwill was lost with domainers. I know of several who cancelled their DT accounts back then and will flat out have nothing to do with the company.
That’s what they get. i submitted some quality names including a great 2 word .com and a 3 letter .net and .org and they were all rejected. Sorry to say, but they need to get some new monkeys at the helm. But seriously, they should not need a trial and error stage. They should have learn tons from the Moniker and Domainfest auctions. Beside, you yourself Andrew wrote a great article a few months on how those could have been improved. Someone at DT should have read that.
p.s
I too canceled my DT account.
KL above is spot on. Jay will never again
have access to prime selling stock unless he
starts mending fences with the domain
community that he apparently has not
recognised is his ‘life blood’. He may be a
good code-cutter, but his commercial skills
are barely above nerd level. An offensive
nerd at that. Jay has alienated his ‘feeder’
demographic by selling their private
information etc. and unless he reverses the
perception that he is a ‘rat’, his enterprise
may fade into oblivion.
Agree with #5 and #7, never will do business with Jay unless he adds an opt out feature to registrant search or definitely takes it down.
You can’t earn money from both sides.
Selling domains at auctions (and getting a fee from the sale) and then getting money from lawyers to provide them your whole portfolio.
Most one word dictionary word have trademarks and Jay provides a tool to allow bogus trademark claims.
The simple fact of owning several generic domain names makes you a cybersquatter to lawyers and the general public these days.
One day, you have to choose Jay…
Wonder if the recent departure of Stephen Douglas from the team has any effect on the company as a whole and of course this past domain auction.
Jay was trying to pre-empt the DOMAINfest (JAN) and TRAFFIC (FEB) live auctions by jamming his in before them, with a 60 day lockup. He announced his auction (last minute) after the other two auctions were in place and dated it for effect. His distain for oversee and rick schwartz/moniker on full display.
The timing, lack of preparation and poor quality of domains blew up in his face.
#9 I think Stephen was only in charge of the Roundtable, so I don’t think it has anything to do with this.
#10 I don’t really think he was trying to pre-empt these. It’s hard to schedule an auction at any time without running into another one. I do think it was thrown together at the last minute, however.