Domain name auction services ought to rethink auto extensions

The current method of preventing bid sniping leads to bidder fatigue.

Last Friday GoDaddy sent out a somewhat confusing notice regarding a change to GoDaddy Auctions and auto extensions.

Previously, any bid placed within the last five minutes of an auction extended the clock by five minutes.

Now, a bid placed in the last four minutes of an auction will reset the clock to five minutes; a bid placed between the four and five minute marks will increase the clock by one minute.

Also, the clock will not be affected if the high bidder changes their proxy bid but doesn’t trigger a price change on the auction.

These are nice improvements, although they might not go far enough.

The point of adding time to the clock is to prevent bid sniping. That’s when people use software (or quick fingers) to place last second bids on an auction, thus preventing another bidder from having time to enter a fresh bid.

While a laudable goal, the current state of auction auto extension at many marketplaces leads to another problem: bidder fatigue.

Many of us have been in an auction in which a competing bidder waits until the last minute to place a bid and thus extend the auction another five minutes. They aren’t doing this since it took them until the last minute to bid. They’re doing it as a game of attrition to wait out the other bidder. If you extend an auction every five minutes for an hour, a competing bidder might just give up. Not since they don’t want to bid more, but since they don’t want to waste another hour of their time playing games.

Although it would require some programming, I’d prefer a system that does a five minute auto extension for the first late bid, but then shrinks the time following that. At that point all bidders will be logged in and playing close attention. They don’t need another five minute alert to respond.