DomainTools Blog

Over $4,000,000 in domains were just sold at the Moniker/Traffic auction. The six huge sales over $100,000 were Families.com for $650k, Greeting for $350k, Blogster.com for $275k, ET.com for $225k, Settlement.com for $200k, PX.com for $120,000, and OL.com for $100,500.

The auction ran smooth for the first 200 or so names and then around that point they started to rush and asked people to leave the room and bid in the hall way. It was a little bid odd, I am not sure how the owners of the last 100 names would feel, they still had reserves listed so there was some protection but there were far less bidders in the hall way. I question why the last few auctions have seemed so rushed at the end.

One of the highlights of the auction was the almost sale of porn.com, we wrote a separate post about that bid situation. Our belief is that the sale was so close to selling and it could change hands after the auction expires once the 15% commission is no longer in effect. But it is our belief based on the evidence we collected in the last post that the name would easily fetch more in a later auction. Let’s see if the owner wants $7 million out of auction or can wait for another auction and possibly get more in a future auction.

Overall it was a good auction and a lot of names traded hands but not allocating enough time for the last half of the auction seems like a blunder. I suspect, and would hope sellers in the last 100 names that are unhappy with the price their name got would be allowed to contest any sale they disagreed with. From the picture below we can see the audience was huge but the room thinned out as the auction ran a few hours. It pays to get a domain listed in the first two hours of the auction. We saw a few proxy bidders in the audience that had real bidders on the phone. I would encourage any live domain auctions in the future to be more interactive with bidders that are off-site and allow Internet bidders who don’t have time to attend a pre-conference event. There is a lot of room for improvement and the buyers and sellers demand it. The Domain Roundtable conference (August 13-15th) has not yet picked a live domain auction company but we expect our live auction to be far bigger and attract a much bigger audience. We will not hold back and will ensure everything runs smoothly. Most people reading our post didn’t attend the show and we think Internet interaction is key. With over 350,000 registered users of DomainTools we promise to raise the bar and get sellers more money for their domains.

(Click for bigger image, 2MB)

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