No sale for HELL.com; Flowers.mobi sells for $200k

I tuned in via WebmasterRadio.FM to the big domain auction that Moniker put on in Hollywood, Florida last Friday. While listening to the professional auctioneer have to say things like “Hot Sexy Babes Dot Com” and “Free Porn Dot U S” was quite entertaining, the real interesting thing to note was the number of domains that got no bids at all, or didn’t come close to meeting their reserve.

Most of the domains that didn’t sell had overly ambitious reserve prices. The owners of Puppet.com were looking for a million dollars. Shock… no bids.

I don’t know if you can say that the bottom is falling out on the market for .coms, but I think it’s safe to say that speculators are being much more choosey about which domains they buy. Just because it’s a single dictionary word domain, no longer means it will command a premium price, and that’s a good thing.

Newbie domainers believe every domain in their portfolio is worth a small fortune, and they price themselves out of some respectable sales by insisting on exorbitant rates. Yes, they might find that one buyer who is either rich and stupid, or rich and really desperate and stupid, but finding that special buyer is winning the lottery (with similar odds of success).

The real shock for me during the auction were the prices some of the new .mobi names were getting. Since .mobi *just* debuted, these guys picked up their domains for registration fees and then turned around and sold them for multiple thousands of dollars in like a months time. That is awesome for the successful speculators and I sincerely hope .mobi actually takes off.

Domainers and companies who can’t afford the .com version of their names have been praying for .net, .info and the other non-.com TLDs to “take off” for years, but it’s just not happening with the general public. The unwashed masses still automatically append “.com” to anything they hear start with “www”. Mobi has a shot if the mobile providers get together and have their devices default to the .mobi TLD instead of .com, like most desktop browsers currently do.