LLLL Live Auction - The Exclusive DNBuff Report
March 23, 2008 by DNBuff
First of all, kudos to Ty (bfluid on NamePros) who organized the entire auction and conducted it in the utmost professional manner and mwzd who generously offered to help with the auctioning. These two guys put their heart and soul into the auction and all of us domainers appreciate your dedication and sincerity.
However, the auction’s turnout wasn’t as much as what I expected. I expected at least 200-300 people to attend the event but the maximum people in the auction room at any given time never exceeded 113. Many major players Reece and Michael_Goldman in the LLLL arena also gave this auction a miss. The listings were well-organized and the quality of the domains was exquisite (SHAM.com, Weak.net etc.) then what exactly caused the auction to miss the status of a roaring success?
1) The buyout clause - This clause basically stated that a seller could pay the winning bidder $5 and be free of all obligations to sell. The clause was originally introduced to make up for the lack of a reserve system but it ended up making the whole thing look like a joke.
The buyout option hindered buyers too as they could never be sure whether the seller would enforce the buyout option or not. In case of a reserve the buyer would be able to ascertain whether he would possess the funds to continue bidding on further names but with the clause there is no way to know unless the seller is online.
Also, there were several bids above $10K and the buyout clause made them look a bit ridiculous as the seller could simply choose to pay $5 and not sell.
If the buyout clause had to be enforced, we could have had a higher amount to be paid, say 5%-10% of the winning amount.
2) Time Confusion - The auction actually started an hour later than it was supposed to start.Ty had no other choice than postpone the auction and he did it but it did cause a bit of mayhem. I cannot complain, as I just got to it 10 minutes before it started believing I was 50 minutes late.
3) Dates - The Easter Weekend was a bad choice for the auction as many people decided to give the event a miss due to other commitments.
4) Excess Of Names - A payment for every lot/name submitted for the auciton would have been a good idea as it would have kept out the rubbish and restricted the length of the auciton to something more reasonable. (FYI, the auction lasted around 4 hours)
Anyways, let’s come back to the auction for now:
The auction started off with some decent LLLL.com’s followed by 7 odd LLLL.net’s. The LLLL.net’s received practically no attention and all of them resulted in buyouts as they went for ridiculously low prices like $5.2 for a quad premium.
Then came the really valuable names like Sham.com, Weak.net and Coil.com (all three resulted in buyouts) . Later, the auction started losing it’s fervor and many big-players had to withdraw as they were out of funds after bidding on the earlier names.
One notable bidder in the final stages was bgmv who was the highest bidder for at least 8 auctions (I wonder how many were buyouts?) and I’m sure he must’ve gotten at least some real steals.
All in all, it was a decent event and an EXCELLENT first attempt. Next tiem, if the changes are implemented then we’ll surely be on our way to having a giga-event guaranteed to turn eyes.
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