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.