New web site makes it easy to get peer appraisals of your domain names.
Domain monetization service WhyPark has released a nifty new tool for getting domain name appraisals from your peers.
Dubbed GroupValuation, the tool lets you submit domains to be appraised and easily appraise others’ domain names. For each ten domains you appraise, you can submit one of your domain names.
It’s simple, and that’s what I like about it. When you post for an appraisal at a domain forum you get a hodge-podge of responses. With GroupValuation, all you do is submit and then check in to see your numbers. The web tool calculates averages for you, and you can exclude any of the appraisals from your average.
As with all appraisals, take the results with a grain of salt. They should be used as one more data point in a long list of valuation approaches. But I could see how posting a domain on GroupValuation.com could have another benefit: someone might contact you to buy the domain.
At the risk of hurting the simplicity of GroupValuation, it would be nice to leave a comment with your appraisals. Sometimes comments are more helpful than numbers.
Interesting idea…
human appraisals are about quality, not quantity. Some people really know what they are talking about, some are clueless, this really doesn’t seem designed to give ‘good’ feedback. Forums, depending on forum, offer a place where some real experts are you can actually gain some real critical feedback. I don’t see this as adding any benefit to the community.
I tried this out with both great and fair names. It was nice to see that the fair domains got low appraisals and the great domains got high appraisals. Very interesting concept going forward.
You are all missing the beauty of the implementation!
Crowdsourcing does not work when the opinions of participants are biased. Sellers tend to over-state, while buyers under-state value. Moreover, if the opinion providers are clueless about value, as in guessing the distance between the earth and the moon, the average of their opinions will remain clueless.
Unlike forum-based crowdsourcing, the judges in GroupValutation are drawn from the pool of domain owners who are on different sides of a transaction at various times. Thus, their incentive is to provide an unbiased option because their long-term interest is in an unbiased valutation of their domain names. Moreover, the number of opinions can be larger than that of forums, a requirement for meaningful average appraisal value.
It should be noted that this is not the first service to specialize in crowdsourcing-based domain name appraisals, but it is the first with a beautiful mechanism.
The post does not explain why you should take the results with a “grain of salt.” As noted above, a large number of biased guess does not result in an accurate average. Thus, the post’s recommendation that the resulting appraisal is “one more data point in a long list of valuation approaches” should be taken with a grain of salt. Moreover, crowdsourcing is the only robust technique to value non-generic domain names, and thus, the only reliable data point. Furthermore, a biased comment can be more harmful than numbers provided by robust estimation techniques.
Nevertheless, GroupValuation will need to monitor the most active users.
As I am not affiliated with GroupValuation, their site does not make it clear whether they are aware of their beautiful solution or whether they don’t think it is important to publicize.
Go GroupValuation. A beautiful first pass!
site seems to be down.
@ tw morse – up for me, try again
seems to be up/ sorry/ may have been network issues on my end.
thanks.