Every night I scan all the auction and drop houses for names. Over the last year, all the auction houses have good days and bad days but one thing has been pretty constant. Sedo hardly has any quality names up for auction on a regular basis.
This is certainly not the case when they put together an auction. When that happens the auction platform is usually packed with solid names, but the other days? It’s like being the last person left at the bar, leftovers and silence. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Sedo is not selling names. On the contrary. They seem to be selling plenty of names in the brokering division and the bid and negotiate section. Users just aren’t sending any names to auction. There are only a few possible reasons for this and these are just my opinions, no facts to back up my thoughts.
1. There aren’t as many negotiations. I would imagine there are a certain percentage of negotiations that go to auction and maybe the overall amount of negotiations are declining, it’s affecting the amount of sent to auctions
2. Buyers want the names more. They don’t want to risk losing the name or having to pay more in auction so they are negotiating more until they strike a deal
3. People are using other platforms. Godaddy and Afternic sales are growing all the time and I would imagine it’s taking away from Sedo
I’m not really sure of the reasons but regardless, in my opinion, Sedo is no longer a daily source of good names at auction. Of course they could change this if they wanted. They could take outside names on the auction list for a fee. Make people pay an upfront free to list their names. It’s become somewhat of a vicious circle because nobody is going to the daily auctions except for the big ones and nobody wants to “friend list” a name because there aren’t as many people coming buy to take a look at the Sedo auctions as in the past. By friend list I mean having a friend or someone you know fake bid to start an auction. Yeah, act like you don’t know what that is but this is done daily. If they started taking names this would all change. Domain sellers are looking for a large marketplace to pay to list names. Namejet is closed to new sellers, Bido doesn’t have the buyers, and Godaddy has too many names and you get lost in the madness. Snapnames seems to work pretty well but it’s often the same as Godaddy. You need to have multiple bids to really get noticed.
So maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’ve started getting used to all the good names coming through Namejet, Snap, and Godaddy and it’s never changed. Maybe it’s like DnForum. I used to live on the site but eventually I outgrew what was being offered there. Or maybe I’m saying what others are thinking.
Your observation could be dead on Shane.
On the otherhand they urge their users to set a fixed price. In conjuction with alot of hosting companies who use their API the result is they do sell a boat load of ccTLD’s.
And personally think that is a big plus when it comes to ccTLD’s. But like i said earlier on, Afternic couldbe better when it comes to gTLD’s.
When it comes to gTLD’s i never had much luck with Sedo though they have some nice auctions.
So yeah your observations couldbe right very right……
Hi Shane,
Interesting post. There’s a fourth possibility: Sellers don’t get buyers scrambling to outbid each other when a domain is sent to auction; it often gets sold at the bottom initial price, with the 1 bid.
On a slightly different note, I sold two domains on the same day last week, one at Sedo, and one at Godaddy; the one at Sedo was sent to Auction with the minimum $60 bid, and it sold for $60, and Sedo charged me the $50 minimum fee, so I made nothing; the one at Godaddy I sold at the first offer made for $200, after the close, the buyer paid, it took Godaddy 5 days to very his funds, I was asked to transfer my domain to him which I did, but I DON’T get PAID my money until 30 DAYS from that day. So, I’m telling this story to show you that the entire industry is full of crooks. There’s NOT one reliable company to do business with. Newbies are advised to find something else to do. No the registrars, not the domain parkers, not the bloggers, not ICANN, nobody is any good in this goddamned domain industry.
The best way is to do selling by yourself, not sedo, godaddy etc, Your domain names get lost in millions of listings. They charge big commissions. You need to do direct selling to end users by contacting or emails to potential buyers who had advertised in google adwords.
Just like you open a fashion shop on a street, you sell the clothings to direct consumers from the streets.
You have total control of your selling deals, no commissions involved when sold by yourself.
I have watched Sedo destroy my traffic all my domains are exact match keyword dot com net org .ca one domain has a google search of one million exact searches per month yet it had one hit on sedo in one year and that was an internal hit when i put a thousand dollar price on it mind you it is a hyphenated dot org but it is the highest searched term for this industry you would think at least a few domainers would type this domain in.If you email me i will tell you the domain name as i try not to be one of those blog promoters.