E-Commerce Times Covers Afternic, Sedo
E-Commerce Times author Anthony Mitchell has published an article that gives an overview of domain name aftermarkets.
The article is a high-level overview of Afternic, Sedo, and other alternatives for selling domain names. It also covers the domain parking programs offered by the two firms. Although I found the article to be very broad and somewhat inaccurate, it is a nice complement to my overview of domain aftermarkets.
Mitchell gives a good example regarding the value of placing an anonymous offer through Afternic:
Anonymous bidding can be initiated from Afternic and Sedo on domain names that have not been listed for sale on any exchange. Ahead of it was listed for sale on an aftermarket exchange, I used an anonymous bid to buy InternationalStaff.com. An anonymous bid was used since I was afraid that the original owner of that domain would increase his price expectations if he knew that a sale offer originated from InternationalStaff.net.
Mitchell tries to compare Afternic to Escrow.com, which isn’t a relevant comparison. Escrow.com is strictly an escrow service. Afternic is a sales service with an escrow service on the backend. The article also discusses changes to Afternic’s parking pages but doesn’t make the leap that this is due to the NameMedia buyout (Afternic’s parking pages now use NameMedia’s ActiveAudience parking program.)
The article also implies that Sedo has price ceilings for listings whereas Afternic does not. Although there may be a listing price maximum at Sedo, this is irrelevant in practice since most domains are listed as “Make Offer”, and offers are freqently made for over $10,000.
