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Here's the The Lowdown
from DN Journal,
updated daily
to
fill you in on the latest buzz going around the domain name industry.
The Lowdown is
compiled by DN Journal Editor & Publisher Ron
Jackson. |
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As
many in the domain blogosphere had predicted
the
real estate domain auction that J.P.
King auctioneers had intended to conduct on
behalf of portfolio owner Craig Harrison |
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yesterday
in San Francisco did not go well. Monte Cahn
of Moniker.com (whose company was slated to handle
escrow for any competed sales) told me that, while he was
not there himself, Harrison had informed him that his
reserve prices were not met. However, according to an
article and photos in the San
Francisco Chronicle today, the real
problem was that almost no one showed up at the Fairmont
Hotel for the sale, resulting in the public auction
being scratched all together. I
couldn't glean much else from the Chronicle article
as it was riddled with errors, including the obviously
incorrect statement that "live auctions of
Internet
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Fairmont
Hotel in San Francisco
Site of a cancelled real estate related
public domain auction Thursday.
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domain
names are still rare." To the contrary, they
have been around for years now and there are so
many these days that some within the industry complain
about live auction overload (for the record there was one
just last week in Amsterdam and there will be
another one next week in Washington, D.C. - so they
are hardly rare events).
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This
brings up something that has become a sore point
with me. Virtually every time mainstream reporters
write about domains their articles are mangled
by mistakes that could easily be avoided with
a little bit of simple fact checking. As
traditional newspapers fade into oblivion, a
common lament from "professional"
reporters is that the quality of online
journalism will pale in comparison to what has
been delivered by traditional outlets in the past.
Articles like this one are pretty much blowing
that theory out of the water though. Honestly, in
recent years, I have seen better reporting
from some of the so-called "amateur"
bloggers in our space than I see coming from very
well known print outlets like the Chronicle. |
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End
of media rant and back to the auction. This one
pretty much had the deck stacked against it from
the start. Most of the names were in the form of
(CityName)RealEstateListings.com |
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rather
than the more appealing (CityName)RealEstate.com
(a form owned in the thousands by Rob
Grant).
Adding
the word "listings", while it is a
logical term, results in names that are just too
long to appeal to most buyers. For example, districtofcolumbiarealestatelistings.com
looks like a bowl of alphabet soup that would be
hard to fit on a business card, let alone key in
without making multiple typos. |
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Add
to that the lack of online bidding (who is going to
travel to San Francisco to bid in an auction for anything
but top tier domains?) and a very stiff buyer's premium (20%)
and the odds of success were extremely long indeed. Still,
we all learn from experience and I can't fault anyone for
trying a different approach as Harrison did here in an
attempt to seek out end users rather than target
domainers who make up almost 100% of the audience at
industry auctions. With
all of the advertising that was done, the enlistment of a
major real estate auction house and the rental of an
expensive hotel ballroom, it had to be a very expensive
exercise and I'm sorry to see that it didn't bear more
fruit. There is always a chance that the publicity
surrounding the event will catch the attention of someone
in the real estate field who can make use of some of the
names among the 2,600 offered. However with the real
estate market currently going through a historic meltdown,
the odds at this point in time are not good for a happy
ending to this story.
That's
it for today. Have a great weekend. I will be flying to Washington
D.C. Sunday for Domain Roundtable and will have the
first of our daily posts from the show in this column
Monday.
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(Posted
June
12, 2009) |
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For
all current Lowdown posts - Go
Here
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We need your help to keep giving domainers The
Lowdown, so please email [email protected]
with any interesting information you might have. If possible,
include the source of your information so we can check it out (for
example a URL if you read it in a forum or on a site
elsewhere).
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