There are many behind the scenes venues for domain sales. We all agree with you when you say,” The domain auction houses are NOT reaching the markets You need to reach to increase the bidding prices on your domains ”

Where are these elusive corporate buyers? One hint may be they prefer to make their transactions under the heading of non disclosed sales or private transactions.
The fact is, many of the most valuable domain names never reach public auctions.

People like Rick Schwartz have been very instrumental in trying to make the private market transactions more transparent by refusing deals unless they are made public.

We as domainers need to follow his lead and insist of our buyers that our sales be publicly disclosed. If we all do this they eventually will come to the auction tables.

Today’s entire family of auctions – and its getting more like a family every day – is inbred with insider dealers. In fact, its a lot like an auto auction. I don’t know anymore, but end users weren’t even allowed at auto auctions back when I was hanging out with a car dealer friend.

If you’ve ever gone to many of those, you’ve seen the same old crowd pushing their product and talking down the competition.

And another thing; I think it was $100 plus a percentage of any sale, but at least you could run a car through with whatever reserve you wanted.

The whole idea of price-fixing your domain name before it goes to auction is a scam. You should be able to set your own reserve. The auction house has a right to start the bidding anywhere they want, but pressuring prices down and locking you out of the auction if you disagree is lame.

More importantly, we need sales data. The data resulting from the auctions of today is generally considered proprietary – and for good reason; if they showed you the historic sales data, you’d never go along with their reserve prices.

The bottom line is that domain dealers and investors need an organization to create a market of their own; one that is transparent and that shares the aggregates sales data with its members.

I for one intend to devote a great deal of effort to this end in the coming weeks and hope that enough of us will be concerned about the issues that you and others have raised to actually participate in the effort.

BTW, I’ve never been to a race, but I feel safe in saying that if RacingDogs.com doesn’t go to a breeder (which it probably won’t), I think you’re going to prove your own points, getting shorted on that one in the process.

I mean, it’s arguably the second best name in the category (I’m thinking RaceDogs.com would be better?), and with race dogs selling for anything from $2K to $20K, I can’t imagine that auction will bring what its worth. But good luck all the same.

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Hi ASN5,

Sarcasm? Sir, I know not the meaning of this word.

I’m actually not being sarcastic, or attempting to be sarcastic in my post. At least not in the overall sense of the topic. I have already been told and warned by many of my associates and my grandma that my writing tends to be “sarcastic”, so I’m aware of that problem. I’m seeing a shrink about it, but she seems to think that my sarcasm is a wart I cannot remove without my head falling off my torso.

As far as Racingdogs.com, it’s a more natural phrasing than “racedogs.com”. If you wanted to know about dogs that race, you wouldn’t search up “race dogs”, but the present tense adjective “racing”, which describes what the dogs are doing as opposed to doubling up on the nouns “race” and “dogs”. Additionally, with “racedogs.com”, you could be searching up whether the dogs are european, African, Asian, Australian, Indonesian, etc. for their ummm… heritage. I would suppose in that context and racing that “racedogs.com” would be a good domain tho.

Thanks for your comment!

SD

If you get the minimum bid for any of your domains:

LeakPrevention.com, AirlineFares.net, RacingDogs.com, and HeavyDutyBattery.com

TAKE IT! RUN and CASH THE CHECK immediately and don’t complain! It’s hard to imagine any ecommerce taking place for those domains, or any company being branded around those names. I would bet that they don’t make squat in the PPC realm!

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Thanks Joe for the comment. Actually, most of my domains up for auction make enough rev for me to happily hang on to them without worry, but I’m testing the system with domains outside my main niches. I really dig your interpretation of .mobi value upgrading once cellphone web access searches replace “.com” with a default “.mobi” extension. Heck, we should pound Verizon, Sprint, and the rest with this idea. “Hey, make your cellphone website access services hit the cash ceiling by making .mobi domains the default web locations for all mobile device searches! Or create an “ad service” for advertisers who want their products to default to a .mobi domain name on all browser or SE search results!” I know that last idea is very ambitious, but so was making light come from a glass bulb with a little thread filament 100 years ago.

Excellent comment, Joe.

SD