the results of the auction were less than stellar and certainly much less than we typically see in a domain auction.
The highest price paid at the auction was $45,000 for “Shearson, “the financial brand unused since 1994 when it was bought by Citigroup’s predecessor and merged with Smith Barney”
Meister Brau, sold for $32,500
Handi-Wrap sold for $30,000,
Shower Mate, Sun and Surf, Continental Illinois went for less than $10,000 a piece.
The Linen Closet, Infoseek, Sports Heroes and Big Yank went for $2K
Computer City and the Financial Corp. of America went for $1,000.
It pretty shocking to see such low prices compared to domain name auctions especially considering the auction was held in New York and marketed with an add in the New York Times.
Infoseek for $1K ?
Wow
The Computer City sales price is pretty telling for the future of PC’s…mobile, mobile, mobile is all that matters going forward. I wonder if “computer” will even be relevant to the English lexicon twenty years from now.
These results don’t surprise me.
We reviewed the domain names associated with these trademarks and the domain names themselves were, without exception, terrible. For instance, the domain name associated with the “infoseek” trademark was something like infoseek-search.com. Had the domain name been infoseek.com, well, we’d have participated in the auction.
It also didn’t help that lots of physical paperwork was required in order to bid in the auction; that must have turned off a lot of potential bidders.
@bill
You are absolutely right.I am shocked that somebody paid those prices for these domain names, trademark or not. They are unusable and have been forgotten for years, and the new generation has no recall of those names. You can expect in the future that the prices for domain names will dramatically decrease, not because of market depression, but due to the quality of the domain names offered for sale. In the past 10 years, the best domain names that were not used by their owners have been sold already, and their existing owners will not put them back for sale, but but once in a while, when a real premium domain name comes along, the price paid will be at least 75% more today than what it would have been two years ago. There is a limited supply of premium .com domain names. The best advice is if you can secure the .net or .org for those premium domain names, you will be a winner.
@Mansour,
I’d take a .TV before I’d take a .net or .org, depending on the keywords of course.
.TV will not be a competitor in the domain business until the price goes down to no more than $15 retail, not $50 as it is now.
@Mansour,
Dynadot is charging $12.99 for .TV registrations right now. Go get ya’ some!
Theres is a great deal of funds out there getting invested very poorly, lack of research or Risk takers?
I was sorely tempted to buy Kiddie City, but as others mentioned- the bid process itself was a pain in the ass.
Also, if I am to understand it correctly, they used some sort of regressive, non-specific open-bid process where you bid an amount, then chose from the pool of available marks… meaning, that every bid would get less and less as the auction went on. Talk about a process that does not inspire excitement, or motivate the whales to stick around to perhaps make an impulse purchase or two while waiting for the bigger ticket items.
All in all, seems shittily handled. Intuitively, I’m guessing these sale prices were bargains, but I don’t know how to value trademarks or defunct brands. Perhaps some may have no value whatsoever, aside from novelty.
Results did not surprise me-
http://blogs.forbes.com/allenadamson/2010/12/09/not-surprising-that-shearson-and-meister-brau-were-the-big-winners-at-yesterdays-auction/