Domain Auctions

In March of this year, NameJet held an auction for Social.org, and the domain name sold for $228,600. The sales price wasn’t much of a surprise considering Social.com sold for a reported $2.6 million.

Unfortunately, the Social.org deal has fallen through. I just heard from the owner of the domain name, and he informed me that the winning bidder did not pay for the auction. I would assume the second and third highest bidders (who also bid above $200,000) weren’t interested in going through with the deal at their high bids either.

As you might expect, the owner is disappointed at the outcome, but he is working with NameJet to schedule another auction for later this summer. Here’s what he had to say:

“I’m disappointed that the auction winner defaulted, but perhaps this is an opportunity to put such a powerful name into stronger hands. It combines the enormously popular ‘social’ keyword with the ‘Org’ extension that is commonly used by community/social sites such as Wikipedia.org, Craigslist.org, WordPress.org, and Google’s OpenSocial.org. I’m working with Namejet to schedule a re-auction in July.”

I reached out to NameJet about this and was told the winning bidder’s account has been banned from future bidding, and the company will do everything in its power to ensure that the bidder does not participate in any future NameJet auctions. The company is continuing to work on ways to tighten up the verified bidder process.

While this auction didn’t result in a sale, I do think it will eventually sell for a lot of money.

For the last year or so, NameJet has been permitting private auctions. They’ve had considerable success with them, primarily because most domain investors use its platform daily. Hundreds of domain names sell daily, and the platform offers liquidity for domain owners, and it’s a good bet that domain names will sell for market value.

I just learned that a private seller has put 47 three letter .com domain names on NameJet.  All of the auctions are “no reserve” and they will sell to the highest bidder at the conclusion of the auction. The auctions will run over 2 weeks starting, from June 15-June 26, and they will be closing June 18-29th.

You can have a look at the auction list here, but I have posted the 47 names below for your convenience.

The NameJet auction for SportsPicks.com just ended, and the final price was $25,660. The auction had a total of 207 bids from 163 bidders. SportsPicks.com was created in April of 1995, and it appears to have recently expired, and as such, it was not a private seller auction.

I was involved in the auction and would have been a buyer in the $10,000 range, but I have concerns with respect to US laws involving gambling. In addition, there are regulations about gambling advertising, so generating revenue may have been difficult on this particular domain name.

Currently, sports betting is legal in just a few areas in the United States (like Las Vegas). New Jersey governor Chris Christie has announced that his state is going to defy federal law and permit sports betting.

According to NameBio, FreePicks.com sold for  $91,250 in April of 2006 on SnapNames.