OK, I’m going to call BS on one of the 5N.com sales shown on Chaomi. I’ve been amazed in the past by the quick turnaround of names that this site sometimes reports, but is it really possible that 97727.com sold twice in a twenty minute span? If so, I’m seriously impressed, but it really has me wondering how much this data can be trusted. Here are the 5N.com (no 0/4) names sold yesterday.
18173.com – $7603
97727.com – $2737
97727.com – $3176 (18 minutes later)
91787.com – $3374
36677.com – $15206 (nice!)
21318.com – $3802
Snake oil BS
As I understand it, Chaomi doesn’t get a private report of sold names directly from the venues they track. And unlike 4.CN these venues don’t publish a public feed of recent sales which could be scraped. So what Chaomi is likely doing is assuming that a listing sold at BIN if it was BIN priced and is subsequently no longer available on the marketplace.
The problem with that approach is that a name could be removed for reasons other than a BIN sale, such as being sold on another venue (potentially for a lower price), or the owner just didn’t want to sell it any more.
So what likely happened is the seller listed it for sale at a certain price, deleted the listing which caused it to get recorded as a sale, and then added it back it at a higher price rather than just editing the price. You could game that site all day long just by creating a bunch of really high BIN listings and then deleting them.
I’ve never really understood the value in tracking BIN prices to begin with. A BIN price means nothing about the market unless an overwhelming majority of sellers are pricing their domains to sell very, very quickly which few do.
Most are setting prices slightly above where the market is currently at so they don’t undersell, then people say the “market” is now at these slightly higher prices, and that causes yet higher BIN prices to be set for new listings. What a great way to result in a bubble, even without people trying to actively game it.
In short, Chaomi is a load of crap and people should stop considering it the short domain bible. They may even be the reason for the absurd increase in prices the past few quarters, Chinese investors take that site really seriously for some reason.
Thanks for the comment Michael. I would also like to know exactly how Chaomi derives their pricing info. When you say “as I understand it”, has someone told this to you, or are you going off of translating the site? One of their main sources for sales is ename, and you can visit auctions.ename.com to see that they have plenty of names closing every day in an auction format just like Namejet or GoDaddy. These are not Buy It Now listings. I’ll pay attention to some of them to see if they show up on Chaomi after an auction closes.
I was told by a Chinese investor, although he doesn’t work for Chaomi or any of the venues so I can’t guarantee the accuracy.
But it’s pretty obvious they’re getting “sales” from the BIN section. Unless you’re suggesting an auction closed, payment occurred, the domain transfer took place, the new owner listed it for auction (which presumably requires WHIOS verification), and the second auction closed, all within 18 minutes. The Chinese may be efficient, but come on 🙂
Without a recently sold feed from the venue you can’t know a BIN name sold, you can only know that it is not for sale any more. I’m told all the charts and stats are based on BIN pricing.
It’s auction.ename.com (not plural) in case anyone wants to take a look.
Ha! No, I’m not suggesting that that process occurred, but maybe this is a mistake of some sort. For the name I mentioned, it showed as being sold by two different seller ID’s so the method of gaming the system that you describe wouldn’t work. That would be the same seller ID each time. Also, if you dive deeper into the data on the market trends page, you can see in the bottom table that they list the number of bids for an auction. So those would not be Buy It Now listings. I’m pretty sure that everything on the home page is based on BIN pricing, but I’m thinking the market trend actual results are not. I’ll try to confirm if I see any actual auction names roll onto that page.
Ah, good point about the seller ID being different. Very bizarre. Maybe one person has two accounts and listed it under the wrong account the first time? That still seems more likely than two full transactions in 18 minutes. Will be interesting to see what you find out.
I picked two 5i.com names that were showing up with several bids and waited the 6 hours for the auctions to close. Sure enough, they both showed up on the market trends page for 5i.com names after the auction ended. So I can’t be 100% sure yet, but it looks like they are showing real sales on that page — at least in the bottom table.