Why do names not sell on forums but sell well as a drop?

[britishbulldog]

Namejet is the highest place i have seen for domain sales auctions i have seen,if you want to get ripped buy there.

 

[denny007]

Who has the time to go through the huge pile of crap posted on forums for sale every day ? Not the typical drop buyer, no...

 

[TheLegendaryJP]

Who has the time to go through the huge pile of crap posted on forums for sale every day ? Not the typical drop buyer, no...

I dont... and that doesnt stop me from knowing, experience is key to valuations, the big players who over pay on drops are kings, kings without experience. You can buy your way into anything.

 

[WhoDatDog]

One of the main reasons is because it is a simpler process. If there was a way to see a name on a forum and press "buy" and then have that name show up in your account without doing anything else then lots more names would get sold.

Many sellers make it too complicated......like having names at troublesome registrars that just add another level to it that lots of buyers won't deal with. It is funny that auction sales have prices that start low and go higher, whereas forum sales start high and go lower.....like $750.....two days later....$500....then $200......then "last chance, hurry" $100....all in the same thread.

Many people are unwilling to give anybody else a good deal.....not even occasionally. They want "top dollar" every time. People think that the highest offer they ever had for a name sets the bar for the absolute lowest they will ever sell it for. That is a big mistake that most will be making for the next few years. They can't accept the fact that some good names are worth less. Just like houses are worth less....and stocks.....all asset classes.

If someone has a decent name that they recently recieved an $800 offer on, then they would never list it in a thread with an initial bid of $400. But if the name was truly worth $800, then they might get double that if they showed they were willing to let the market determine the price.

The good news is that because forum prices are so low, there are often great deals for buyers, and most everyone is always buying something. If you are trying to sell, and the name has any value at all, then you will likely get something on the forums. Sometimes that quick cash means a lower price.

One other factor is that if lots of people see a thread where a name or names are getting little interest, that tends to hurt the value. Those that put a reasonable initial price on the names will often get multiple bids that will drive it higher....just like auctions.

 

[axeman]

Amagine how great it would be if you had a choice 1 month before renewal date for example, to push the domain into auction before it dropped, that would be a godsend surely for many.

 

[IBN]

Amagine how great it would be if you had a choice 1 month before renewal date for example, to push the domain into auction before it dropped, that would be a godsend surely for many.

..

 

[DTalk]

It is funny that auction sales have prices that start low and go higher, whereas forum sales start high and go lower....

The most amazing forum auction psychology I ever saw, was a guy (at another forum) a few years ago that posted a domain for sale.

His rules for auction were that the reserve for the domain was $1....Bidding increments could be whatever bidders chose...and that he would guarantee to sell the domain to the eleventh bidder - and only the eleventh bidder - at whatever the price bid by the eleventh bidder (if there wasn't eleven bids, he wouldn't sell the domain)...


Well, the first 5 bids were $1 dollar increments....the sixth bidder broke the cycle, and jumped to $20...then...all hell broke loose...The next bidder came in at $80 (I think)....then, a bid of $180....etc....The domain was sold to the eleventh bidder at $858, I recall...

I remember thinking it was a reg fee domain....!!...Just brilliant...!!


Ahhh, the psychology of somehow creating perceived value....

.

 

[domaingenius]

Someone offered me a domain once at $500 but turned it down. They then let it drop, I caught it and sold it within few weeks for $15k.

DG

 

[Gerry]

The biggest issue here is very, very, very few folks are the end user.

They want it for a bargain, knowing full well what it is worth.

Look at it this way...someone recently offered me $12.50 each for 25 LLLL.com that they hand selected from a list of nearly 800. Said they wanted a reseller bulk deal.

I just sold one of those hand selected on sedo for $500.

On the flip side of this, I picked up an LLL.mobi on a drop for less than 20 bucks. I have owned it for less than 30 days. I just posted it on the forum yesterday with about 50 others. I just one on Sedo for $500 bucks that came off the list.

 

[bobovia]

Something, something, something, Dark Side. Something, something, something, buy my domains.

 

[DTalk]

The biggest issue here is very, very, very few folks are the end user.

Agreed, Doc.



Another auction success I saw at Sedo was very smart (so smart I wrote to the guy after the auction to ask how he did it).

This guy had a great keyword, but on the .ac extension.....It had come on to the 5-day Sedo auction at $2100...

As the days wore on, I noticed heaps of new (separate) bidders started to arrive, and bid (I think there were about 10 bidders, eventually).....The price steadily rose.


Final selling price was: $26,500, for this .ac domain.


What I found out he did, was that the moment he sent the name to Sedo auction (at $2100), he invested in very targeted Keyword Ads (matching his keyword domain), using Google Adwords - and, ran a campaign during the 5 days of the auction - driving targeted traffic to the Sedo auction page...

He said that he'd invested a total of $900 in advertising - and flushed out enough potential buyers to take the auction from $2100 to $25,000.....despite the extension!


Worked brilliantly...

.

 

[Gerry]

Worked brilliantly...

Whoa, you may have to PM me the details.

 

[Deleted member 111831]

I often think about this as well. I think its a combination of things:

-The auction format is a far more efficient way to determine 'market value'
-Easier searching at auction sites
-More eyeballs at auction sites
-More retards on auction sites
-All the heavy hitters on the auction sites who will pay obscene prices for the names they want - but seem not to bother with the forums
-Having to deal with people on forums gets old and people give up - sellers with unreasonable expectations being the main problem

Among others.

For your domains that are going to drop and you think would get bids at auction, you might want to consider Fabulous as your registrar. They started a revenue sharing program where they send all dropped domains to auction, giving you 60% of the proceeds. I'm test dropping a few $xx domains this month to see how they do - I think there is a good chance they could get $xxx+ at auction - might turn into an interesting way to sell low end domains, albeit with a stiff commission from the registrar.

 

[britishbulldog]

Amagine how great it would be if you had a choice 1 month before renewal date for example, to push the domain into auction before it dropped, that would be a godsend surely for many.

You can with tdnam !

 

[AMERICAR]

Agreed, Doc.



Another auction success I saw at Sedo was very smart (so smart I wrote to the guy after the auction to ask how he did it).

This guy had a great keyword, but on the .ac extension.....It had come on to the 5-day Sedo auction at $2100...

As the days wore on, I noticed heaps of new (separate) bidders started to arrive, and bid (I think there were about 10 bidders, eventually).....The price steadily rose.


Final selling price was: $26,500, for this .ac domain.


What I found out he did, was that the moment he sent the name to Sedo auction (at $2100), he invested in very targeted Keyword Ads (matching his keyword domain), using Google Adwords - and, ran a campaign during the 5 days of the auction - driving targeted traffic to the Sedo auction page...

He said that he'd invested a total of $900 in advertising - and flushed out enough potential buyers to take the auction from $2100 to $25,000.....despite the extension!


Worked brilliantly...

.

This is a dotAC domain that you are talking about for $25K ?

**This guy had a great keyword, but on the .ac extension.....It had come on to the 5-day Sedo auction at $2100...**

Please tell what .AC domain name could possibly be worth $25K ? i find that hard to believe no matter how much money may have been ploughed into advertising ...

I have had, and still have some incredible one word catagory killer .AC domains .. they have never been worth the reg fee that they cost to keep ..

I've dropped more .AC's than i still keep. I keep a few, 3, maybe 4, forget, just as trophy names in a .COM the equivilent name/s would be worth millions of dollars .. every year that renewal comes around i have to really push myself to renew the .AC names ..

The only .AC name that i know of that has ever been worth anything is http://www.sms.ac thats a huge developed/branded site ...

There are plenty of prime key word cat killer names lying still unregistered or previously dropped in the .AC extension ...

Correction to above .. SMS.AC was a huge SMS Text website now appears to redirect to http://www.fanbox.com/socnet/ ...

SMS aint what it used to be i guess ...

 

[Honan]

.......
So the big question is why does that happen? Why would a name you are willing to sell at say $20 or whatever usually not sell on the forums but often does sell for $60 or even a lot more at places like Snapnames and other venues. That's a real mystery :?:

Because people only want what they cannot have

 

[mattbodis]

Many many reasons. But mainly comes down to 2 I think:

1. Volume

2. All domains that have bids must sell.

It's impossible to buy on the forums. I know because I work with many buyers that have let's say 1 million dollars to spend and can't find any domains for purchase.

On the forum the max volume they can do is like 50k a month if they are lucky.

Someone that has and wants to spend as much as 1 million, needs to be able to spend it fast. Not over the course of 3 years, and definitely not 3 years that are spent 12 hours per day talking to sellers that over price their domains, back out of deals, sell stolen domains, yada yada yada.

Usually all business operate on a 20/80 rule. You can assume that 80% of all SnapNames auctions are won by 20% of the top bidders. I think the real number is more like 5/95, but 20/80 is usually the safe one to stick with.

These 20% have hundreds of millions, and they are not going to find 100s of millions of domains to purchase here that are actually market value and definitely not going to buy them with just a click of a button as a seller/buyer process is a very long and tedious one especially when buying hundreds of thousands of domain names.

End of day, I think these auctions are actually fairly priced considering all these advantages.

The buyers are making back all their money in revenue via auctions even if priced higher. The buyers would still be looking here endlessly for deals while with auctions they'd already make their money back in that time.

If the actual ratio is lower than the 80/20 rule, then that's a different story.

But you can ask yourself same question when bidding on Adwords as an advertiser vs Bing. Why are there so many more advertisers on Adwords rather than Microsoft Bing if Microsoft Bing is known to have a better advertiser conversion rate? The answer has always been volume. I think it applies here too.

 

[Deleted member 111831]

Many many reasons. But mainly comes down to 2 I think:

1. Volume

2. All domains that have bids must sell.

It's impossible to buy on the forums. I know because I work with many buyers that have let's say 1 million dollars to spend and can't find any domains for purchase.

On the forum the max volume they can do is like 50k a month if they are lucky.

Someone that has and wants to spend as much as 1 million, needs to be able to spend it fast. Not over the course of 3 years, and definitely not 3 years that are spent 12 hours per day talking to sellers that over price their domains, back out of deals, sell stolen domains, yada yada yada.

Usually all business operate on a 20/80 rule. You can assume that 80% of all SnapNames auctions are won by 20% of the top bidders. I think the real number is more like 5/95, but 20/80 is usually the safe one to stick with.

These 20% have hundreds of millions, and they are not going to find 100s of millions of domains to purchase here that are actually market value and definitely not going to buy them with just a click of a button as a seller/buyer process is a very long and tedious one especially when buying hundreds of thousands of domain names.

End of day, I think these auctions are actually fairly priced considering all these advantages.

The buyers are making back all their money in revenue via auctions even if priced higher. The buyers would still be looking here endlessly for deals while with auctions they'd already make their money back in that time.

If the actual ratio is lower than the 80/20 rule, then that's a different story.

But you can ask yourself same question when bidding on Adwords as an advertiser vs Bing. Why are there so many more advertisers on Adwords rather than Microsoft Bing if Microsoft Bing is known to have a better advertiser conversion rate? The answer has always been volume. I think it applies here too.

This is a great post and I think you hammered the nail squarely on the head.

When you figure in the value of those big investors' time - and the time they would lose looking for, haggling over, getting screwed on names on the forums - paying a premium for the convenience and safety of the auction format makes a lot of sense - and probably saves them money in the end. And it perfectly explains why they rarely (if ever) waste their time on the forums.

This is a dotAC domain that you are talking about for $25K ?

**This guy had a great keyword, but on the .ac extension.....It had come on to the 5-day Sedo auction at $2100...**

Please tell what .AC domain name could possibly be worth $25K ? i find that hard to believe no matter how much money may have been ploughed into advertising ...

I have had, and still have some incredible one word catagory killer .AC domains .. they have never been worth the reg fee that they cost to keep ..

I've dropped more .AC's than i still keep. I keep a few, 3, maybe 4, forget, just as trophy names in a .COM the equivilent name/s would be worth millions of dollars .. every year that renewal comes around i have to really push myself to renew the .AC names ..

The only .AC name that i know of that has ever been worth anything is http://www.sms.ac thats a huge developed/branded site ...

There are plenty of prime key word cat killer names lying still unregistered or previously dropped in the .AC extension ...

Correction to above .. SMS.AC was a huge SMS Text website now appears to redirect to http://www.fanbox.com/socnet/ ...

SMS aint what it used to be i guess ...

Do yourself a favor and let the other ones drop too, unless you plan to develop them. And consider the money you wasted part of your education - and stick to .com's.

 

[Fearless]

Agreed, Doc.



Another auction success I saw at Sedo was very smart (so smart I wrote to the guy after the auction to ask how he did it).

This guy had a great keyword, but on the .ac extension.....It had come on to the 5-day Sedo auction at $2100...

As the days wore on, I noticed heaps of new (separate) bidders started to arrive, and bid (I think there were about 10 bidders, eventually).....The price steadily rose.


Final selling price was: $26,500, for this .ac domain.


What I found out he did, was that the moment he sent the name to Sedo auction (at $2100), he invested in very targeted Keyword Ads (matching his keyword domain), using Google Adwords - and, ran a campaign during the 5 days of the auction - driving targeted traffic to the Sedo auction page...

He said that he'd invested a total of $900 in advertising - and flushed out enough potential buyers to take the auction from $2100 to $25,000.....despite the extension!


Worked brilliantly...

.

I love this idea. Someone posted something similar before but it didn't involve a live auction. I can see how that would juice up the results.

 

[shack]

I think it's actions not words. If someone list their domain for example on sale/offer they are starting the process for selling that domain. What I've seen the last couple of years, people listing their names and some do get bids of $5 $10 $20 $50 $100 $200. I saw a very good domain a few months back and people were offering a few hundred bucks, that same domain would command $50,000+ on live auction.

I like it when someone states they have million dollar budget or $50,000 budget to purchase domains, send me what you have, or they are looking for clients to purchase domains, pretty funny when all they have to do is look at the threads and see domains they can purchase anytime if they are interested.

Look on TV and you will see some weird names, or public companies, they have strange names, and they are doing great. It's not all in the stats, Remember that! It's in the marketing of the name and so on.

I would stay only with .com's, we all know how they sell.



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