If you want press about a domain auction, you need a unique angle.
Last week Sedo announced its latest online auction, and the press ate it up.
The auction was covered by L.A. Times, Investors’ Business Daily, TechCrunch, CNET, MarketWatch, CNBC, Engadget, and on and on.
Compare this to the typical auction Sedo and its competitors run. They might be covered be a few domain blogs, and the press release will get syndicated, but that’s about it. Back in the good ole’ days some press would cover the live auctions, but then even the pitch of a live domain auction was no longer newsworthy.
So why did Sedo’s latest auction get so much buzz? It is the story behind the auction.
The auction is for a number of Yahoo!’s long neglected domain names, including AV.com (formerly used by Altavista), Sandwich.com, and Sled.com.
The interesting thing isn’t the premium-ness of the actual domains. It’s that Yahoo! is selling them and many of the domains have a story themselves.
Just having an auction with a handful of good domain names is no longer newsworthy, at least to the mainstream press.
There’s a message here for domain auction organizers: create a story. Land a few domain names that have some interesting history or a big-name seller. Not all of your domains have to be special, but if there are a few and you pitch it right then you can get press outside the domain industry.
Great post Andrew. We all want to sell our domains. But the rules of ‘marketing’ are often ignored. Telling a story is a great way to separate yourself from the herd. People will always give you their time if you offer them entertainment. Thanks for the reminder.
It will be interesting to see if the added exposure translates to higher overall prices and/or reserves being met.
Difficult to tell as there’s not control group to compare it to. I figure many of these domains take more than a week lead time to sell.
Actually, the auction received ‘link love’ and coverage by the aforementioned media, when it was announced at the official Yahoo! blog, then it went viral.
Sedo’s PR – the actual text of which I don’t see it being linked in your article – had very little to do with the overall exposure that the auction received.
Doesn’t matter if Sedo spread it or Yahoo, the point is it was newsworthy. You can bet Sedo asked Yahoo! to blog about it.
It was newsworthy because Yahoo! promoted it as such, not because of some magical press release that Sedo sent out. Your article seems to imply that Sedo did some type of PR wizardry which was picked up by tech media. This wasn’t the case. In fact, most press releases in the domain industry are rather mundane attempts at infusing enthusiasm that by default the industry lacks.
It’s true that I wrote that Sedo announced the auction and the press ate it up. I know you hate Sedo right now, and they can’t possibly do anything right in your eyes…but perhaps we should credit Sedo with bagging such a PR-worthy auction and getting their client to blog about it then rather than finding a way to not give credit where credit is due.
i think the fact that they are owned by yahoo plays a big part.
A very select few have met reserve, and most not even close. The cloudapp.com auction is more noteworthy IMO.
I doubt many will sell in the auction…probably a lot more action afterward. People now know Yahoo is open for business for its dormant domain names.
It will be “newsworthy” if they sell…