While many are focusing on big ticket domains at Moniker and Rick Latona, I’ll be paying attention to Aftermarket.com auction.
It’s go time.
TRAFFIC hits New York City this week and there will be four auctions, including an opening night auction featuring mostly domains from Rick and Howard, plus auctions from Moniker, Rick Latona Auctions, and Aftermarket.com (TrafficZ).
Already the competition has proven valuable, pushing the different players to sell themselves in order to get domain listings. I only submitted domains to the Aftermarket.com auction, and two are included: BrokerageAccount.com and Headcase.com. StudentChecking.com, which I sold a couple years back for way too little, is also on the list.
At first blush Aftermarket.com’s domains don’t seem as promising as those of its competitors. But that’s until you read the rationale behind the selected domains. Aftermarket.com and DomainConsultant.com, which helped the company select domains for the auction, looked for domains under $100,000 [Update: DomainConsultant.com didn’t exclude domains over $100,000; it just didn’t find any that it felt were good values at the reserve price.] that had good potential at the stated reserves:
Very early on in the process we decided against ‘window dressing’ – knowing full well our list would be viewed as being sub-par upon first glance. But as we publicly stated before, we concluded that, as consultants, our job is to pinpoint “value†for our clients.
Potential ‘value’ is defined and categorized as Short-Term (traffic/revenue), Long-Term (end-user sale/development), SEO value (growing importance), Price value (below/at market), Perceived value (first impression/credibility), Generic value, Industry value (size, scope and scale of applicable industries).
The following fifty or so domains were chosen because we identified a minimum of THREE of these specified values in our research and selection procedures.
Indeed, the list doesn’t include a lot of big names that other auctions have, but it is also absent crazy reserve prices. The domains are priced so that many of them could be bought by investors and flipped for much more at a later date. Headcase.com surely fits into this category.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out for Aftermarket.com. Of course, the entire event will be interesting given the turmoil on Wall Street and the fact that people have paid $2,000 to attend an event that will focus largely on sales.
jp says
Can’t agree more. Reserve prices at the auctions need to make sense for domainers, not end users. And whats worse, given the current evolution of the public’s understanding of domain names, these reseves make little sense to most end users as well.
Imagine if more of the prices/reserves made more sense for a domainer to buy it. I imagine then there would be more domainers with good names, all trying to educate and sell their names to end users, rather than a smaller concentrated group of people who are individually less motivated to deal with the public. I think, the bigger our sales force, the faster the public will learn.
Adam says
Andrew, to clarify some misconceptions Domainconsultant and aftermarket.com didn’t make the decision to go with under $100k names early on. (We’d love to sell all $100k and up domains) Rather the list determined that direction. As we refined the list looking for the names that were priced right, it became clear that the majority of them were in this under 100k price range.
Shuwix says
Couldn’t agree more with JP.
Adult webmasters have this problem. Too much newcomers, having small sites, often with copyrighted content without licence are droping traffic and sales cause everything is really easy to get on rapidshare,etc.
Tons of kids trying to get piece of pie will drop earnings for serious webmasters, domain traders and others involved.
If any kid from street play freelancer graphic designer, graphic designers won’t have enough work.
Stephen Douglas says
Whew! I was hoping Adam would come in and clear up that misconception of Aftermarket.com purposely selecting domains under $100k. http://www.domainconsultant.com will tell you honestly what your true domain value is, whether for enduser or domainer wholesale priced. As it stands, the domains offered in the Aftermarket.com auction are very reasonably priced for their true value, and properly focused on domainers instead of endusers (since nobody advertised to endusers).