Not every bid is a bid to win
MapleDots came back to Namepros and detailed an auction battle that he had with Huge Domains. The domain name was CanadianRed.com and he won the auction at $1,280.
Huge Domain bid $1255 USD for CanadianRed.com
I had to go to $1,280 to get the domain.
I posted this for all the folks that keep saying Huge Domain bots stop bidding at $150-$250
There you have the evidence…. they have definitely increased the amounts they are bidding at.
Now there has been a lot of conversation over the years about GoDaddy bidder id’s. I started calling for them over 5 years ago. There were many times that GoDaddy reps came out and said no bidder id’s.
Things got spicy in March 2019
Paul Nicks published a post about employees bidding on names at GoDaddy auctions.
From the article:
On March 11, a GoDaddy customer contacted us with serious allegations against multiple employees. These allegations alluded to employees potentially participating in auctions, shill bidding (coordinating bids to drive prices higher), and providing insider information to clients.
Paul did mention that certain things were not found,
To be clear, our investigation uncovered NO evidence that this employee used any confidential customer information for personal gain, or that he conducted shill-bidding on auctions.
In April of 2019, surprise! Bidder id’s
Each bidder will be given a unique bidder identification number, which will be different and unrelated to the customer account number to prevent social engineering. Bidder identification numbers will be automatically assigned sequentially, and they can not be changed by a bidder. The only way for a bidder to get a new or different bidder ID is to create or use another GoDaddy Auctions account.
During the course of an auction, the individual bidders will continue be masked as they are now (“Bidder 1,” “Bidder 2,”…etc). At the conclusion of the auction, participants in the auction will be able to see the unique bidder ID number for all participants in the auction.
It did not take long for people to find out what the bidder id was for HugeDomains. Bob Hawkes suggested they should register it for vanity reasons.
Now one of the reasons why the id’s are a string of numbers is because GoDaddy did not want buyers being bid up and targeted. Joe Styler had noticed and mentioned posts on Namepros where people talked about bidding up Frank Schilling on NameJet in years gone by.
That does not seem to be working completely. There are people making assumptions based on when a bid comes in, that it’s Huge Domains and they bid on the name just to get them to bid more.
In the MapleDots thread, one member mentioned,
I’ve actually had a pretty good day running up the amount my opposition had to pay to win today. A couple of true dogs got bid up to 300. It is just something I do for fun…I love it when the bots go crazy bidding against me for a name that will never sell!
Another commenter suggested everyone chime in:
Why not play the HD game against HD. Any domain HD is likely to bid, let us Bid up and let them run out if their budget. They are a Huge Company, surely they work on predefined budgets every qtr
While discussing this thread earlier with someone on the phone, they told me they knew of a few guys who did this. Bid on domain names they don’t want, just looking to bid up other domainers.
I asked if this was centered on Huge Domains? He told me the person he knew the best said they just really do it for shits and giggles.
A lot of people like to focus on seeing an auction get that first bid of $12 toward the end of the auction and then they are there with a $17 bid and look to see what happens.
As I have said before it’s good to be GoDaddy. Because now they got people just bidding for shits and giggles.
Thank you for an entertaining read. Might I say this was the best thing I read in a long while, it’s hysterical hyenas going after other hyenas.
I guess it beats real work.
Some people are idiots.
Fun read, this is basically lunatic behavior. Why not just send Paul Nicks a gift basket and save the bad domain bids?
So godaddy gets to profit from names left to expire for whatever reason, money that is not theirs really…….and now people are throwing money at them? I did love the headline, shits and giggles brought me here.
Thanks for posting
Treat others the way you wish to be treated.
Did no one have parents growing up?
The Godaddy, and Huge Names partnership seems very illegal in terms of the way auctions are sanctioned. I am sure the Arizona attorney general would have an issue how people are being fleeced by an automated bot, court order to uncover how many nda agreements godaddy and turn commerce have signed with each other should make for an interesting class action, what do you say Aman?
This sounds like ego stroke because they have lost an auction, “Oh yeah the name was bad and I was just bidding the other guy up”…..sure you were.
They will win a chunk of the auctions and they know it. The only exception will be the people who win a bunch of auctions and don’t pay. So either these people are deadbeats or they are BS’ing.
No there are people who did it just to do it. They might be potential deadbeats that get their account closed. Some see it as the little guy fighting Goliath, they believe Huge Domains has an unfair advantage and they want to mess with them any way they can.
I remember many years ago there was a big auction on Afternic, I think it was Register.com inventory. There was one name I liked a lot CityMobile.com, I won the auction and after the whois changed I got a pm on namepros, the member said sorry about citymobile.com, I was the one bidding you up, I did not want it but did not want to see it go to someone else cheap. Wish I knew it was you I would have dropped out.
On NameJet it definitely happened where you knew who the member id belonged to.
Read between the lines, he said he won a name against them CanadianRed.com $1,280. He doesn’t know HugeDoamins limit and is bidding on names he wants. There is no such thing as bidding people up but managing to be the underbidder in every auction.
Mike Mann you to say all this stuff back in the day aswell. Used to claim he was just trying to put competitors out of business by bidding so high. Reality was he wanted the names and wanted to put others off by giving the impression of irrational bidding.
I was not talking about MapleDots Paul, he is a real legitimate buyer. It was just his thread.
He did not say:
I’ve actually had a pretty good day running up the amount my opposition had to pay to win today. A couple of true dogs got bid up to 300. It is just something I do for fun…I love it when the bots go crazy bidding against me for a name that will never sell!
And as I said but you are always one to debate if Paul wouldn’t do it, no one would do it, there are a lot of smaller domain investors from all over the world that have contempt for big domainers and companies like Huge Domains.
Like one guy told me when I said he could lose his account, “I will have another one in less than 24 hours.”
Well like I said, they are either deadbeat buyers or real bidders who are ego stroking after losing names all day.
If they run up auctions they will end up winning 50%. It is a mathematical certainty so each ID wouldn’t last long.
Raymond are you sure snoopy is not a Russian bot? I mean the guy thinks he knows it all, as some of the worst takes I have ever read.
I will tell you I watched auctions one day and when I saw $17 bid after a last minute $12 bid, I bid $22 and I did not want any of the 5 names I did that with.
I would have paid $22 if I won, not losing my account, but I bid in the hopes of being a pain in the butt to HD only.
I am sure he is not a bot. I am not sure I see how this strategy makes sense? $27 is nothing to Huge Domains so it’s not even a pimple on the butt.
That is a classic, you run up auctions but if you won you would have paid!
That is not running up, that is called “bidding”. This is why I say this is all about ego when people lose. It is like the guy who bids on a house then says the car was crap anyway when he loses. If he won he would have said the car was brilliant.
Did I say run up? I said wanted to be a pain in the ass, if it made those assholes pay $27 for something they would have got for $17 I am happy. Did not want any of the names, one of the names was a typo genius.
It is not logical to bid on random names you don’t want and then pay for all the names that you win and don’t won’t.
Sounds like you are angry about losing auctions and trying to rationalise it afterwards, pretending the bids weren’t genuine. That is the logical conclusion here.
I agree it’s not logical, but a lot of the times they are bad names, I don’t know what 99123 bid on, but Mister Funky seems to have taken great pleasure in getting names up to $300 that will never sell. That’s part of this, it’s not bidding up OneCare.com and losing, it’s getting off on bidding up sprinky-dink.com.
I had to reply here, I meant as a cover, you use ego stroke same thing. I meant these bidders are not losing and then using I was just running up as a cover or ego stroke as you say. It’s about bidding on bad names, like Mister Funky wrote:
I’ve actually had a pretty good day running up the amount my opposition had to pay to win today. A couple of true dogs got bid up to 300. It is just something I do for fun…I love it when the bots go crazy bidding against me for a name that will never sell!
Why would HD bid $300 on domains that “will never sell”? Why would other people find those “names that will never sell” and bid to $295 then stop?
Obviously some names are very high value and some low but overall I have not seem this trend of bidding up to $300 on names that are worthless. HD do know what they are doing here and its a “huge” mistake to assume the names they are buying are no good.
Here is one user
This is interesting: I made an embarrassing mistake today. I bought futurenglish.com. I didn’t notice that the name is missing a second E. Damn it. $127 wasted.
But here’s what’s interesting. Huge Domains was the other bidder that ran the name up to this level, with their one and only bid at $124. Why would a sophisticated bot not notice that this name is not made up of two whole words? What made HD buy it? Was it an algorithm? Was it a human who made the same mistake as me? Obviously it’s worth anything. Very strange.
https://www.namepros.com/threads/huge-domains-sniping-godaddy-closeouts.1135689/page-23#post-7637077
The term is FuturEnglish, there is enough branding around the term to warrant some value in my view. FutureEnglish.com is probably more a $1,000 domain on the drops.
That’s really just a waste of time in my opinion. I know guys are bidding up worthless names, or at least in their opinion. It’s the part snoopy is missing, people are doing this with lousy names they don’t want to win and then use it as a cover if they lose the auction.
What do you mean, use it as a cover?
If they a really having an effect on the final price they will win 50%. That is not possible to avoid.
On the flip side if they are bidding $500 on $10,000 names then they will have no effect on the price and nobody is going to notice or care.
This is the most fun I have had reading a domain blog post since Rick outed Chef Patrick. Thank you very much.
Glad we can entertain you.
@Snoopy I agree they will win some, I don’t know 50% is the number. If they win these are the possible scenarios
1) They tried to bid Huge Domains up and got stuck with a worthless name
2) They won’t pay, probably only get suspended for not paying $27 or $37
3) They won’t pay get banned, get a new account.
I am willing to get paid to bid the domains to jerk up the price…heck, I am easy, available but not cheap and making money.
Some people are paid to spread fake news too….
So hire me!!
Regards,
BullS
MBA,PhD
Magna cum laude
Graduate of Domain King Academy
MBA-My Big Ass(all of you have one)
PHD-people having dickheads