Different Approach to Domain Auctions — Aftermarket.com Takes

While many are focusing on big ticket domains at Moniker and Rick Latona, I’ll be paying attention to Aftermarket.com auction.

It’s go time.

TRAFFIC hits Fresh York City this stretch and there will be four auctions, counting an opening night auction featuring mostly domains from Rick and Howard, plus auctions from Moniker, Rick Latona Auctions, and Aftermarket.com (TrafficZ).

By now the competition has proven valuable, pushing the different players to sell themselves in order to get domain listings. I only submitted domains to the Aftermarket.com auction, and two are included: BrokerageAccount.com and Headcase.com. StudentChecking.com, which I sold a couple years back for way too little, is also on the list.

At first blush Aftermarket.com’s domains don’t seem as promising as those of its competitors. But that’s until you read the rationale behind the selected domains. Aftermarket.com and DomainConsultant.com, which helped the firm select domains for the auction, looked for domains under $100,000 [Update: DomainConsultant.com didn’t exclude domains over $100,000; it just didn’t find any that it felt were good values at the reserve price.] that had good potential at the stated reserves:

Very early on in the process we decided against ‘window dressing’ – knowing full well our list would be viewed as being sub-par upon first glance. But as we publicly stated ahead of, we concluded that, as consultants, our job is to pinpoint “value” for our clients.

Potential ‘value’ is defined and categorized as Short-Term (traffic/revenue), Long-Term (end-user sale/development), SEO value (growing importance), Price value (below/at market), Perceived value (first impression/credibility), Generic value, Industry value (size, scope and scale of applicable industries).

The following fifty or so domains were chosen since we identified a minimum of THREE of these specified values in our research and selection procedures.

Indeed, the list doesn’t include a lot of big names that other auctions have, but it is also absent crazy reserve prices. The domains are priced so that many of them could be bought by investors and flipped for much more at a later date. Headcase.com surely fits into this category.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out for Aftermarket.com. Of course, the entire event will be interesting given the turmoil on Wall Street and the fact that people have paid $2,000 to attend an event that will focus largely on sales.