Domain Magnate

Sedo is notorious for making sellers pick low reserves to “encourage more bidders” and while it sometimes work, frequently there aren’t enough bidders in the first place, so names end up with low prices. This mostly refers to GreatDomains auctions.

Next GreatDomains event has these names in the list, among others:

Attended.com no reserve
Calcium.net $1-$499
Debbie.net no reserve
Doctor.net $5,000-$9,999
Illicit.com $1,000-$4,999
Doorway.com $1,000-$4,999

Now some of these reserves are just ridiculously low, someone will get bargains!
I think low reserves only hurt the sale, there should be either no reserve at all, like on snapnames and bido, or a fair reserve like there is usually in TRAFFIC auctions and good sedo auctions. Low reserves will just reduce the domain’s value in the eyes of the buyer. A quick example is when I recently sold my coriander.com for just $5100 on greatdomains auction with reserve $5k, after it went up to $9k on a sedo auction previously, shy of reaching its reserve. There are simply not enough bidders to create a bidding war to get the price up, especially now due to summer, recession, election, global warming..

The Montenegro Times reports:

30,000 applications have arrived to date for the registration of Montenegrin Internet domain .ME, the domain company have announced.

The company announced that the next round of registration, functioning on a first-come, first-serve basis, would start on July 17, during which all available domains would be awarded to the first bidders that meet required conditions.

  read more »

The recent dnjournal report featured many high value .ca domains sales from myid auctions.

CV.ca $54,977
Income.ca $26,242
Diploma.ca $17,999
Pharmacies.ca $15,663
Eyeglasses.ca $11,410
ZZ.ca $9,959
STD.ca $4,149
LoansCanada.ca $3,112
MontrealMortgages.ca $2,624
AccountingJobs.ca $2,438
Enjoy.ca $1,817
VancouverTravel.ca $1,816
WebTemplates.ca $1,559
QuebecHomes.ca $1,556 read more »

I was just checking the recent sales of cvcv.com at tdvr.com and noticed a strange thing.

Both sold on sedo, same week, almost same letters and similar quality, yet such a big difference in price, why?

“Fehu” has 162K results in google and there is a developed site over at fehu.org, with alexa below 1 million, so it has some traffic. It also seems to have some mystical meaning, but that can hardly contribute much to a reseller price. read more »

Update: bidding up to $500K now, reserve seems to be $800K

Pizza.net at TDNam at 420K, 4 days left and reserve not met yet.

I do NOT believe this.. I could see the .com going at that price, but the .net? Looks much like shill bidders trying to capitalize on the big pizza.com slice. As long as the reserve not met it doesn’t count. We’ll see if it’s true or not, my bet is it won’t sell. The description also says:

The ORIGINAL Pizza Search Engine It includes 60k pizza restaurants, Prior art to Microsoft’s zip code patent

But that doesn’t add much value. The site looks quite simple, you could get a similar one built for a couple hundred bucks with the ready database.

View the pizza.net discussion on DNF for more info

Either way good luck to the seller.

I’m preparing to unload a part of my portfolio and I was recently wondering where is the best place to auction them.

While the two main venues are sedo and snanames, to my surprise the replies varied.

Those in favor of sedo are saying that:

• sedo has larger audience
• sedo’s fees are lower - indeed snapnames charges up to 20%, while at sedo it’s only 10% read more »