Sells $30,000 in Domains — DomainTools Auction
Bidders absent during online live auction.
DomainTools‘ January auction has concluded with lackluster results. Based on sales completed during the live portion of the auction, I calculate $31,800 in sales with a median price of $1,000. Domains are still available for purchase, still, and the number will increase ahead of everything is stated in done. By now a couple late bids have been received.
So what went wrong?
1. It was put together too late. The call for domains was sent out December 5, less than a month ahead of the auction was originally scheduled to end.
2. The list of domains was released only a week ahead of the auction was scheduled to end.
3. The auction was originally scheduled to occur when many people were still on vacation (January 3). It was then extended to today.
4. The seller agreement required sellers to allow DomainTools to sell the domains at a discount following the auction. Smart bidders will just wait until following the auction to buy assuming no one else was bidding on the domains. They just had to watch the auction, and if no one else bid then let the domain auction expire and buy it at a discount afterward.
5. There weren’t many good names and reserves seemed high.
The highest sale is BuilderLoans.com at $8,000.
I had a little difficulty when I started watching the auction today. It seemed that following the first a number of auctions it “refreshed” and began the first auction again. I tried it in a couple browsers and had the same problem, but then it started working a bit later.
DomainTools is planning another auction for February. I hope it decides to delay it to provide more lead time.
The next industry live auction is SnapNames Live at the upcoming DomainFEST. The preliminary list for this auction looks solid, with name such as neighborhood, bookmarks.com, soapoperas.com, and face.com. Hopefully the reserves will be reasonable; we’ll find out soon.
