With over $4.5M in domain sales at last week’s TRAFFIC auction, should it be deemed a success?
$4.5M is a lot of dough. 1/3 of the total sales came from one domain, Cameras.com for $1.5M. (See a complete list of sales from the auction here. See video of the Cameras.com auction here.
But was last week’s auction a success? A number of premium generic domains failed to sell. Perhaps the reserve prices were too high, or perhaps the buyers at the auction were looking for a different type of domain.
ITWeek declared:
Premium generic domain names may be losing their appeal after an auction failed to bring in large sums for many that would once have been deemed highly valuable.
An auction of names including cameras.com, auction.com, elections.com, babies.net* and hell.com late in October saw some names fail to reach their reserve price while others went to modest bids. Expectations of higher prices were fuelled by the $12m sale of sex.com earlier this year.
I don’t think generic domains are losing value. On the contrary, I think they continue to soar. My guess is this is simply an issue of the crowd at TRAFFIC wasn’t looking for some of these domains. You have to have a business plan before shelling out a million dollars for a generic domain. Many of the buyers at TRAFFIC are portfolio buyers who can’t justify paying a multiple of 100x for a generic domain.
One of the bright spots at the auction was .mobi, which had two great sales. Flowers.mobi sold for $200,000 and Fun.mobi banked $100,000.
*My records show babies.net sold for $26k, but perhaps this did not consummate in a sale.
Tommy says
Domainers are not the end users in most cases. Those names and prices were geared for someone looking to develop the site for brandability. I heard a rumor from a reliable source…. Ireit recently bought Recipe.com. Not sure what they paid.
Editor says
That is true, most of the buyers at this event are looking to buy “wholesale”.
Dominik Mueller says
I made the following post on this topic on a domain forum earlier today:
“Generic domains don’t go down in value… The issue with the TRAFFIC auction was that there were almost only domain resellers and parkers attending. That’s why the premium domains – except cameras.com – received only low bids or didn’t sell. The 500 attendees were the wrong buyers for good domains. I don’t say the live auction was no success. It was, indeed, a great success for the low- and medium-priced domains… just not for the premium domains. These will only sell for reasonable prices if there are targeted corporate buyers sitting in the room.”