As we reported earlier today the TRAFFIC Live auction did 4.3 million in sales.
Some are sounding the alarm that this is a bad sign for the domain industry, since the auction did quite a bit less than the Miami TRAFFIC auction held in October.
However, you need to look at the big picture:
- Most importantly, DomainFest.com which held an auction just three weeks ago did over 3.1 million dollars in their live auction and another 1 million dollars in the silent auction.
In the past, many of the domains that sold at domainfest would have been submitted and been sold at TRAFFIC.
If the silent TRAFFIC auction does 1-2 Million dollars next week, as I would expect, then the combined amount for this TRAFFIC show would be $5,500,000-$6,500,000 (the live, silent and no reserve auction which did almost 200K on Monday night). Including the domainfest auction the total will be $9,500,000-$10,500,000.
$10 Million+ in domain sales within a month is pretty good in my book. Also don’t forget there was an auction at the idate show, which was also held within this same three week period that produced another $160K in Sales.
For comparison sake the Miami TRAFFIC show was held in October 2007. The show previous to that was the TRAFFIC New York show that was held in June.
- This TRAFFIC auction was top heavy with expensive names. There were 60 names out of 234 priced with a reserve of $100,000 or more. This translates into over 30% of the domains offered for sale. At Traffic Miami there were only 36 domains in this price range. This caused a loss, assuming 20K domains in their place, of at least another $500K in sales.
- As we discussed a couple of months earlier the most important factor in whether a domain is going to sell at auction is the reserve price. Take a name like cotton.com which had a $10K reserve and sold for just short of 100K. One needs to price their names not at the top price they would like the name to sell for but at a price that will attract interest and bidding.
If you would like to re-read our analysis of the Live Miami TRAFFIC auction and the effect of reserve pricing you can see it here:
https://www.thedomains.com/2007/12/18/pricing-your-domains-for-auction/
We will produce a similar report next week for this show.
The domain name sales price will not be affected in a negative way by the inflation since it is a GLOBAL business where people from all over the world can enter the business and the start up cost to register a domain name is next to nothing.
The current bust in the housing bubble in the USA is not affecting the domain name business.
Altrough the bust in the Housing bubble in the USA is a OPPORTUNITY to buy houses bellow the REAL Value since many of the property’s are selling bellow their real value (liquidation sale) so the finance company’s can recover the money quickly.
Do NOT LEAVE IN FEAR – If you have the finances get more domain names and register them for another two years (especially the ONE Word Domain Names of any kind of Country Codes).
You will cash in in the next two years at LEAST 100 fold on the One Word Domain Names
To YOUR SUCCESS
Excellent point about needing to combine the sales of this Traffic with the very recent DomainFest to get a more accurate picture of the current domain resale market–which in light of this; as well as the sales volumes at other resale venues; is doing just fine.
In fact, the best approach to providing the most accurate continuous window on the resale market would probably be for Ron at DNJournal (if he can find the time) to report on weekly total sales volume; say of all domains reported to him from 2k+.
This would also make for good historical month-to-month and year-to-year comparisons.
lol 100k for a .mobi
guffah
flowers.mobi still holds the record at $200K
Remember the movie ‘boiler room”? where stock brokers ‘create’ markets on a pump and dump, heavily dependent on the ‘bigger fool theory’? My question is “why would someone pay these big numbers for something that gives them… nothing but blue sky speculation?”. The same theory could be applied to the .to and .ws marketing ploy’s.
Basically, .mobi is a small group of insiders who monopolized ALL the choice names, and ‘created’ an inflated marketplace, where suckers- i mean buyers buy on enthusiasm and hype, and not any fundamentals: like for instance, hard type in traffic numbers. “Hey our .mobi got 6000 hits last month!” well, I mean type ins that arent the domain owner, other domainers, or web developers.
Johnny
Once again we are not a big supporter of .mobi’s.
Actually it was the .mobi registry that held back the best names and did not released them on when the .mobi were first allowed to be registered.
The registry has been auctioning them off at the live traffic shows and online through sedo.com.
Both porn.mobi and tickets.mobi were names that were auctioned off by the .mobi registry.