Moniker Live Auction Recap

I spent this afternoon doing some work while listening to the Moniker Live auction. While I am not surprised at the results ($2.56 million in sales), I am a bit disappointed in them. I was hoping to see somewhere in the ballpark of $4-5 million in sales, assuming Israel.com didn’t sell. I realize there might be more bids in the silent auction that continues for the next several days, but I don’t think the final tally will increase substantially.
Here are a few of my opinions for the auction:

  1. Sellers still have very high expectations for their names and fairly unreasonable reserves. I think domain owners need to understand that in today’s market, buyers aren’t going to spend a ton of money on a domain name simply because it’s a great domain name. Unless a buyer has a plan for the name, chances are good that they won’t pay a premium for it.
  2. Many decent/good one worders that would have sold in the $15-30k range at past auctions didn’t sell today or sold for less today.
  3. From what I heard from a couple people in attendance, the house crowd was smaller during this auction.
  4. Non-.com extensions saw much weaker results than before. I believe names like 20.net, Garden.info, and all the .mobi names would have sold for much more a year ago.
  5. If you have a good name and set a good reserve, bidders will bid it up and set the price – just what happened in the case of PostalCodes.com.

I was expecting a weak auction, and that’s what we saw today.

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

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