John Motson, owner of DN Expert, launched his new site Mystery Domain Auction a few days ago. The website promotes itself as a 50 day auction with the highest bid winning a domain worth $10,000 or $10,000 in cash.
Bids are incremented by $0.01 each time. If the bids reach around $147 John will have met his $1,000,000 target. Yes he is hoping to make 1 million dollars through this website and give $10,000 back. Doesn’t sound like a good deal does it?
Before I give my opinion of this site, I encourage you to visit the site itself and also check out some recent reviews of the service.
Mystery Domain Auction
I read today that YP.com was recently sold for $3,850,000 to YellowPages.com. I know 2 character domains are worth a lot but that’s a crazy amount.
In the UK yellowpages.co.uk redirects to Yell.com, which is how YellowPages has marketed itself online in the last few years. The USA Yellow Pages is hosted at yellowpages.com but now that they have YP.com, perhaps they will rebrand their site in the future.
Regardless of the size and wealth of a company, no one spashes out 4 million dollars on a domain unless they have something planned for it. It will be interesting to see what they do with it.
I got an email today from Domaining.com, the popular domain name news aggregator.
Hello Kevin Muldoon,
A quick note to tell you the Domaining.com membership is no longer free!
All has a end, it’s now time for us to charge an annual fee.
It will help us pay our bills but also secure our site where new exciting services for registered domainers should be available soon.
As a result free accounts have been closed today, you’ll no longer receive our newsletter.
You are invited to sign up again if you are serious about domaining.
Ah I forgot, don’t panic, we are only asking a $35 annual fee.
Best wishes for the new year,
Francois Carrillo
Domaining.com
It wasn’t a website I read regularly so this change doesn’t really concern me. However, I was very surprised to see them adapt this model. As Reece points out :
I was browsing the featured domain listings at Sedo today and I noticed quite a few celebrity domain names.
Names include :
- benaffleck.com
- mattdamon.com
- penelopecruz.com
Theres another day or so to go in the auctions so it will be interesting to see what they sell for.
I have always been wary of buying domains which could be snatched away from me but there seems to be a lot of domainers who are willing to take a risk and squat on popular names and trademarks. At the moment each domain has had around a dozen bids with the current price for each domain being $500+. Which isn’t too expensive if you get to keep the domain.
And perhaps you will. The description on Sedo for benaffleck.com says :
Domain receives 2000-4000 uniques/month
There have previously not been any legal issues with the domain.
Hope you’re all having a great Christmas. Just remember, when you’re all stuffing your face with Turkey, Santa is busy hijacking all of your premium domains. You have been warned!!!
