5 .me and 5 .travel were offered at the live auction as was 1 .asia, of which only 1 hit over $10K and some did not even meet reserve

The auction length isn’t a problem, I mean the auctions that netted over $5 million and over $10 million were longer

When you couple marginal quality domains with higher reserves, you get what you got. Factor in the economy and all is clear.

From my vantage point, many high quality name holders are waiting out the depressed market. They’re selling the lower tiers from their portfolio, if at all.

Domainers are generally not in expansion/speculation mode so yes, end user prospects are the future of domain sales.

You can go to my http://SellingToEndUsers.com page and read my process for selling to end users and give it a try yourself.

(Sorry for the self promotion but it’s a great process that I use and posted for other domainers to see and use.)

the auctions are just too long.

4 hours? Come on!

Let’s do 30-40 really great names
at great deals, and you’ll see
sales pick up.

I sat in for an hour and left
and came back 2 hours later and it wasn’t over yet.

It’s just too long to sit through.

Aron

Your points about the entire process being tedious
and antiquated ring true.

I find the whole auction thing a big turn off myself and feel that selling to domainers is a dying model.

The once healthy PPC revenues are a thing of the past and so is buying based on revenue.

The end user is the future to those who are creative enough to find the right eyeballs and stand a chance at making the most $$$.

I am pretty much done with wasting my time
with these industry wholesale auctions.

Here are my thoughts…

Even though commissions were raised to 15% and promises were made to the sellers that the domains would be widely marketed to end users and domainers alike, I think we can all agree that did not happen in the slightest fashion.

The auction catalog… Excel format? This is 2009, not 1999… let’s get with the program. I don’t know about anyone else but that thing makes my eyes bleed just trying to sift through it.

Submissions… Think you can submit names and then go back into your account and add pertinent data later, such as stats and descriptions? HaHa.. think again… think “Black Hole”… that’s right, you can’t. So you try and find a support rep to help you… I doubt I have to even comment on how fruitless that is. I had one single word generic name rejected that makes over $1100/mo with a 6yr reserve – all because I couldn’t get back in to add that info… oh well.

Now, as for the names themselves… There really were some great values there and some others that may be overpriced for wholesale domainer to domainer pricing, that is true. But what if the promised marketing had actually been done beforehand and the names had been dutifully shopped out to the various end user industries? I read one account of there being less than 100 online bidders at the auction. Doubtful many of them were not domainers, huh?

Sure, times are tight and domainers are looking for bargains. That’s reasonable.

But not making any more than the bare minimum effort to garner attention, buzz, and excitement over this event? That’s something else entirely.

“The list, final and done, needs to be out at least 2 full weeks before the auction so proper promotion can do done.”

Funny thing is you can have a list of 90% of the names 3-4 weeks before the auction. Publish it – promote it – sell it.

Then add a supplement the day before – all auctions work like this and there is no reason a full list should not be available even longer than 2 weeks before an auction.

Ironically, this seems to be the same story every time so hopefully next time …..