Go Daddy Moving Back Into Private Auction Space with .Pro Auction

I received an email this morning from Go Daddy announcing a private .Pro auction event. Please correct me if I am wrong, but I don’t recall Go Daddy ever hosting a private auction event in the past, and if that’s the case, it’s pretty big news in the domain industry (update: a friend told me they hosted “Signature Auctions” several years ago).

According to the email I received, “Go Daddy Auctions is holding a special event auction for some fantastic .pro domain names. They are one, two and three character names never before released to the public.

Go Daddy is facilitating the auction, but does not support .pro TLD … yet.

The auction will begin on January 10 at 7am PST and run through January 17. Some of the domain names at auction include the following:

  • 1.pro
  • 2.pro
  • b.pro
  • x.pro
  • go.pro
  • pet.pro
  • xxx.pro
  • we.pro
  • buy.pro
  • inc.pro

Auction starting prices range from $50 up to $5,000 for the single letter and number domain names. I don’t know if $5,000 for a single letter/number .pro domain name is a good price, but the market will tell us.

For the most part, I’ve only seen private event registry auctions like this held at auction venues like Sedo, Pool, Snapnames, and NameJet. With new gTLDs around the corner, this could be a foreshadowing of events to come. Perhaps Go Daddy has hopes of securing special event auctions on premium domain names in new TLDs. It might be a wise idea to hold a private .CO auction in conjunction with the .CO Super Bowl commercial.

Personally, I don’t see a whole lot of investment value with .Pro domain names, but this particular auction will certainly be worth watching considering the audience may include far more end user buyers than usual.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

8 COMMENTS

  1. Godaddy’s auction in 07 weren’t very well received but they weren’t very well marketed either. I suspect that a lot has been learned in the last 5 years as godaddy has expanded their premium listings and aftermarket in general.

    Itll be interesting to see how much homepage coverage and promotional effort goes in to an auction like this especially with a tld that’s pretty much “bleh”

  2. They have been advertising that auction on TDNAM for weeks (passively). Some interesting names though, even for somebody who has never paid any attention to .pro in the past.

  3. I wrote about this a couple of weeks back, see link above for the post.

    It’s interesting since GoDaddy is starting with .PRO, not the most popular of extensions, so will be enlightening to see the final prices these achieve and if additional end users actually participate as compared to say a sedo or nj or snap auction.

    The domains themselves are pretty good, so that’s a major plus.

  4. .PRO has very little value IMO. It was interesting to read that .CO is being promoted again in 2012 during the superbowl.
    Elliot, it is a great time to host an auction for .CO after or just before this. Hopefully, they will have some good names up this time, as opposed to the garbage they have had for auction in prior events.

  5. Godaddy definitely had a .ME auction in 2008 – I bought some names (large number for me – around two hundred names if I remember – some for my own use and some for a client with development ideas).

    Godaddy had a lot of technical issues with that .ME auction. Issues during the auction AND during payment phase AND during transfer phase.
    Transfer was most annoying. While most names transferred on the schedule they said … or only a day or two late, but…
    I had one name that I didn’t get until several months late (around 5 months after paying). That name was -also- one that they somehow also charged me twice for (of course it was the highest price one I purchased).

    That name wasn’t the only one with problems.

    In the end, I spent a ton of time after the auction cleaning up all the problems they left me with. Godaddy customer support often is better in other areas, but it was pretty much horrible for this auction. No one seemed to know what was going on.

    I guess it was worth, some of the names I did well on (but my client never did anything with his names and now I am slowly unloading them also).

    I’m sure they learned a lot and it seems likely that the software platform has probably completely changed since then.

  6. Hi All,

    We have opened bidding on the .PRO auction.

    @Laptop – There were some difficulties in the .ME auction but bargains were had during that event just like I expect there will be bargains in this one. The platform this time is completely different as is the leadership so I don’t anticipate we’ll have any of the same issues.

    -Paul Nicks

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