In an email to an acquaintance of mine back in October of 2006, I suggested that it would be beneficial for his company to introduce industry-specific live domain auctions. At the time, there had been three (or so) successful Moniker live auctions at TRAFFIC shows, but I don’t recall any industry specific auctions. Although the live auctions found success targeting domain investors, I thought domain owners were missing the sweet spot in selling their domain names to end users.
Although my acquaintance never organized an industry specific auction, there has been some success with domain auctions targeting end users. Moniker created Internext and the Casino Affiliate Convention, which I believe are good starts. However, I believe we should continue to educate end users and ultimately target them for industry specific domain names – possibly sponsoring auctions at their own tradeshows.
Back in a June post on my blog, I suggested that a company work in conjunction with an industry specific tradeshow to sponsor a seminar about the value of domain names. If we teach end users about why domain names are valuable, just maybe they will want to buy great domain names for their business. If we can do this, why not hold industry specific auctions at their tradeshows? There will be a captive and newly educated audience in attendance. In my opinion, it is something to consider, and I think a company like BuyDomains.com or Moniker could undertake successfully.
Below is the content from the email I sent to an acquaintance in October:
“I have an idea for your company. Would you be interested in organizing monthly industry-specific live auctions? With your connections, you could run a live auction once a month, inviting end-users and domainers alike to bid on industry-specific auctions. For example, in January, you could have a telecommunication-specific domain auction. For this, you could invite some end user contacts such as Verizon, Vonage, ATT, SBC
Sounds like a good idea, Elliot.
I’m a relative newbie, so something like this could help me and other new domainers to finance their ventures (e.g., hiring SEO help) by selling names that we no longer need.
Auctions at industry trade shows is a brilliant idea. Domainers would need to reach out in advance to the companies that would be attending the trade shows, and educate them about the advantages of owning generic domains.
Because your webmaster designed these pages so that three hundred million visually-challenged people CANNOT alter the font size used on your pages, you continue to lose people who come here and cannot read the tiny, weak fonts. Sorry.