Five questions to be answered this week in L.A.
Last week I posed 5 questions in advance of the TRAFFIC conference, and answered them yesterday. Today I’m off to Los Angeles for DOMAINfest, so here are five questions that will be answered during this conference:
1. Will DOMAINfest attendance hit a record? I think so, but we’ll have to wait to see.
2. Which party will be better, The Getty or Playboy Mansion? If this were the first year of both parties I wouldn’t bother answering the question. But given that many people already attended the Playboy party last year, and there will be many women attending the event, it will be interesting to see which night gets the highest approval rating.
3. Will the SnapNames bidding scandal have any affect on the conference? Most big SnapNames customers settled with the company a while ago. Still, it will be interesting to see if any questions pop up, and how they are handled.
4. Will the Fairmont be able to handle the crowd? Given that attendees have already filled up the Fairmont and one overflow hotel, I worry that the Fairmont’s facilities might not be accommodating to so many conference goers. But with the entire hotel limited to DOMAINfest, that should ease some problems.
5. Will the Moniker auction take advantage of a large audience? Or will many of the attendees skip the auction, like last year? It will be interesting to use this auction as a gauge for the domain market.
Sal says
The question to be asnwered at DomainFest will be the identity of Nelson’s
co-conspirators and the other bidding Alias he used.
Hint: Nelson bid almost exclusivly on Trademark typo domains. Berkins, to his credit, was not in those auctions and hence had very little info for his analysis.
Domain Investor says
Quote –
“Nelson bid almost exclusivly on Trademark typo domains.”
WRONG
Sal says
In my history I show him winning over 500 auctions and only a handful are generic.
Belmassio says
Since I buy only generics I could not find him in my tons of auctions over the years.
I do remember seeing his name, but I suppose I passed on all those that were TM domains b/c I never ended competing with him on a single one which amazed me.
Sal says
Belmassio, the same situation applies to Berkins which is why his analysis is faulty. Nelson put himself in tens of thousands of auctions but for the most part he only bid up trademark typos. He wasn’t dumb. He knew where the money was.
More than a few people have figured out Nelson’s other bidding alias.
Sal says
While Berkins did a fine job with the little data he had, he really didn’t have much to work with because he doesn’t bid on TM typos. Berkins says he was only in 34 auctions that were won by Nelson:
“Out of the 590 auctions he placed a bid in other than the initial bid, he won just 34 or 5.8%. Compared to the 2,023 auctions he was in, Halvarez only won 1.7%”
When it came to quality typos his win rate was much much higher. Don’t forget he had 3 days of traffic data that nobody else had.
Based on very little data, Berkins concludes that Halverez was Nelson’s only bidding alias. Berkins says, “Bottom line we could not find any of these high volume, high bid, and low win accounts that matched Halvarez’s bidding pattern.”