Domain Name News, Domain Industry News, ICANN News, Registry News

Earlier today, while browsing a couple of domain forums (NamePros , DNForum , DomainState), I saw a poll on DomainState that indicates the first batch of Bido domains is weak. Our take on it is it’s all relative. “Weak” in comparison to what? Million dollar domains? six figures domains? For what we’re doing, starting price of 1$ and no reserve, we feel these domains are extremely strong. The question we asked some of our friends before the list was chosen was: would you bid 10$ for this domain? Would you pay 100$ for that? How about 1K, or 5K? The responses to these questions on the list published were all in the four and five figure range. Now will these domains actually go for these prices? This is what we’re all going to find out. It is not what I believe they should sell, it is not what other believe these domains should sell, it is about what the market will bear at the time of auction.

(Sample screen shot of a domain listed with Bido with a US $500.00 Bido Guarantee)

From our experience the list we published represents a solid five figures inventory for a total starting price of US $8.00 and no reserve. While we would all want to see million dollar inventory for 1$ starting point and no reserve, without solid history and experience in the auction field, without making sure the software works and handles everything as we hope it would, it is just unrealistic at best. We believe, once we test the system, once we build history, once we are more comfortable, at some point such inventory would be available.

I would like to hear more of what kind of domains and domain categories you would like to see listed? Are you interested in three letter .com domains? four letter .com? product type domains, information based domains? Geo domains? IDN’s? possibly other extensions than .com? SEO (Search Engine Optimization) driven domain names? Direct Navigation (Type-In) domain names? Revenue (cashflow) domains? The more you tell us the better we can serve you.

P.S.

A little update for the day, we’re testing and testing and testing some more. All of us are extremely tired, working days and nights to meet the deadline. We look at the release date (June 18th 2008) as the STARTING POINT of Bido, not the ending point. There are going to be many fixes, many upgrades, and many issues to deal with, some that we are aware of and some would be concerns/feedback from our users. While we do not know how Bido will work at start we do have what we believe is a novel goal in mind - to create a liquid market in the illiquid world of domain names.

Source: Posted on TheConceptualist by Sahar Sarid -- Reprinted with permission -- June 15, 2008