After viewing the Moniker silent auction results, I found quite a few surprises:
In my opinion, there were a few good deals to be had. I believe the following domain purchase was an absolute steal for the price at which it sold:
Illustrate.com
I was surprised nobody picked up the following names, as I thought the reserve prices were more than fair:
Finances.com – $500,000
Whiskey.com – $470,600
Handhelds.com – $58,830
Another surprise to me was how much stock in numerics seems to have dropped. There were many NNN.com numeric names that seemed to have reasonable reserves ($5,890) but didn’t sell – 634.com , 547.com, 481.com, 643.com, 493.com, 342.com, 441.com…etc. There were also a few NN.com names that had higher reserves but didn’t sell. It isn’t very often that pure numeric .com names come onto the market, and I was surprised a speculator didn’t grab them.
I was also somewhat surprised that more .mobi names didn’t sell. I am not a big believer in this extension, but after reading how vigorously this extension has been defended by its supporters, I am surprised there wasn’t more action on them. Quite a few people have been posting that they made xxx% profit so far and still have quite a few .mobi names in their portfolios. If these people felt strongly about the extension, I would have thought they would be willing to reinvest and buy some of the names. One would think that reinvesting in a few of these names could have led to a round of “aftershocks” that followed when Rick Schwartz paid $200,000 for Flowers.mobi.
I believe many of these names will move now that the auctions have ended. Domain investors know the owners are interested in selling, owners know the domain investors at TRAFFIC thought their prices were too high, and I bet some compromises will be made to close some deals once.