ExpireGuy said:
....a huge plus for Snap, Enom, GD and NW when it comes to future patrons I guess. Maybe even a few others if you checked Yahoo. :wink:
If by future patrons you mean people who want domain names, I don't see it that way. For any given name you want, you can only get it from the service that successfully catches it. You don't have the option of shopping around. Anyone serious about catching a dropping domain is going to be using all the possible services where the price of admission is less than the perceived value of the name.
If by future patrons you mean registrars, it makes sense that registrars would tend to affiliate with services that pay them the most, and an efficient market would tend to favor services who get the highest sale prices on the largest number of names. (But the proliferation of accredited registrars means registrars will be seeing a smaller and smaller share of the pie anyway, eventually to the point that it isn't worth the price of accreditation.)
GeneralBill said:
If a rational bidder was to use this system, they would specify the most they were willing to pay in the first round. Then, in the second round they wouldn't offer a penny more (so, there is no point in the second round). If you offered less than you were really willing to pay (in the first round), then you would risk losing the name to others. The first round seems like a big money making move for Pool (however, some people might get lucky and win some great names that others didn't bid on because they were scared to waste their time). The second round helps make even more money off of unrational bidders.
In the scenario you describe, the "rational bidder" gets screwed every time. In a normal auction, you only have to pay what the second highest bidder thinks the item is worth, not what you do. That first bid at Pool is not a proxy bid! If you bid a million and the number two bidder bids a thousand, say good bye to a million bucks.
I used to be in the military surplus business and attended a lot of auctions. My favorite type was called a spot bid auction. It was like an on-the-spot sealed bid where everyone wrote down what they would pay for each item as it came up for bid, and the highest bid won the item. If you absolutely had to have the item, you had to bid high because you didn't know what the next guy might bid. But if you didn't much care whether you won it and bid low, you could walk away with some real bargains. Much more uncertainty than a normal English auction. The difference between that and a real sealed bid is that you always knew how much working capital you had left and could quit any time. Under Pool's new system, you have to split your available capital among all the auctions underway because you never know which ones you might win. Those with deeper pockets may actually pay less by weeding out some of the competition who can't afford to bid on as many names.
arty:
