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:
- 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.
- 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.
- From what I heard from a couple people in attendance, the house crowd was smaller during this auction.
- 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.
- 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.
