Adam Yamada-Hanff shared a link with me to a My First Million podcast featuring someone who has been active in the business of domain names but I had never heard about him or his business before. I embedded the podcast at the bottom of this article.
Sheel Mohnot runs a company called Innovative Auctions, and according to his reporting on the podcast, the company sold more than half a billion dollars worth of Internet real estate. You may be scratching your head a bit, as did I, but the company was responsible for many of the auctions involving the new gTLD domain name extensions. Many of the new gTLD contention sets participated in the ascending clock second price auctions managed by Sheel’s company. According to the podcast, the top couple of auctions went for over $100 million, although the extensions and amounts were not shared.
Here’s a description of the podcast found at the Listen Notes website:
“Our hero today – Sheel Mohnot (@pitdesi) created an online auction site (like Ebay, but instead of selling beanie babies, he auctions off internet real estate). He has hosted $100M+ worth of auctions, keeping a 4% cut for himself along the way. Hear how he found this wacky niche, got the auction platform off the ground – and how he went from living on $1/day in India to becoming a self-made millionaire.”
The first round of new gTLD applications and auctions has completed. I believe ICANN intends to have subsequent rounds of applications for new extensions, but I do not believe the schedule for applications and auctions has been set yet. I presume Innovative Auctions could be involved again.
The podcast was first aired in October of 2019. If you’re interested in domain names, particularly the new extensions, you should add this podcast to your list. As I was writing this, I also discovered that Andrew Allemann posted a podcast with Sheel in 2015.
*You may be scratching your head a bit, as did I*
Scratching every part of my body and it will be interesting to see few of the auctions they carried out.
I am working on a wonderful auction site for new domains. it’s going well! Its functional now, but I like to make it nicer. A lot of features. I need to write some guides, for sure. Tho in practice it’s not very difficult. The systems and methods I use to stop scammers / shills / deadbeats are not often used.
I SMELL BULLSHIT
steve
http://www.wordunscrambler.com
Some guy goes from $1 per day to selling $100M gtld extensions is the Fadi life story, far fetched, but seems like there is more to it, 4% is a generous commission for auctioning off a GTLD, don’t ICANN breaks off anyone a piece of bread that big, they like to keep it all for themselves.
What will make you scratch your n*** is the website that shows up when googling his name and company. I am lost for words. When he said .app .whatever
No doubt in these days domain auction business in running too much profitable and everyone need a some good and high authority domain for his/her business. In this way they can rank highly competitive keywords in some months.
in these days it is so difficult you find yourself some expired domains with good DA, DR, because the giants alraday sitting and taken all these rich domains and sell it again with some high prices.