Good News and Bad News

The bad news first - not a single bid on SpecialEffects.TV today at Bido. There was a reserve, so that might have caused people to hesitate with putting in a bid, but with 40k exacts and a relevant extension, I would have expected at least one bid. I hope the upcoming auctions on Friday prove that the issue was really that the .TV extension is dead in the reseller market for right now. We'll see if having a reserve price is an almost immediate "no sale" at Bido. If that's the case, then there will be issues as I'm tired of selling names at $28. There will always be exceptions obviously, but with having to pay per reserve, there needs to be a fairly high chance that there will still be some bidding on the name for it to be worthwhile.

That said, I still enjoy being a bidder on Bido - I've won two domains in two days that I'm very happy about. I won them without competition and I wanted to discuss why these names were overlooked by other Bido bidders and why I like them.

SonomaCountyWine.com

This was one I actually "accelerated" by bidding on it while it had no votes (or maybe only 1). My initial bid ended up winning. Why did I bid on it? Well, for one thing, it is one of those odd domains that has more Google results when you add quotes (4 million results when you add the quotes, 1 million without quotes). That in itself intrigued me. But I don't usually care about number of results. I care about ads, searches, brand and development potential and this has it all. Sonoma County is synonymous with "Wine Country" in California. This generic covers local Wineries, the Wines themselves, and Wine Tours. When you add all 3 keyword combinations, there are a significant number of searches I'll be going after with this name. The only real downside is that the exact searches are under 500, but that's really just the tip of the iceberg. A minisite is perfect for this though to see how well it ranks for various keywords and how much traffic it can generate.

SalsaBowls.com

Okay, you are probably wondering why I'm so happy about getting these names by now. Let's just say that I'm working on building up a nice stable of .com exact match domains. Particularly, I'm looking for around 1k exacts and with a clear product or market. And Salsa Bowls fits perfectly. The singular and plural combined total around 1.5k exact searches per month with a significant number of advertisers. While the product itself isn't necessary a high-priced item, customized team logos and more expensive materials like marble and ceramic can also raise the individual product price. The thing that really hooked me on this name is that Google only had 22k search results for the quoted term "Salsa Bowls" and the singular version was still under 90k. With only 22k search results, I can't imagine NOT ranking on the first page of the Google and Bing in very short order.

What's funny is that while Estibot apparently considers this a negative (as their valuation is very low), I am of the opinion that if there are advertisers and products and searches a plenty, having a low number of pages out there on the interwebs for my term is a positive thing. After some Googling of this idea, I ran across this interesting post on the very same topic that Elliot Silver put up over a year ago. I'm curious if his results have shown that he was right in his theory or not.

If you've had good results with this or have anecdotal evidence that having a larger number search results does matter, talk back at http://twitter.com/UtterDomain

Putting Bido to the Test

So, I've setup my Bido auctions using the new Bido Credit system. I used 5 credits to set reserves for each of the following domains that will all be auctioned on Friday, November 13 (lucky Friday the 13th!). If you've been following me on Twitter you'll notice some of these are recent hand reg's and some are drop catches. It may seem far fetched to put reserve prices on recent registrations, but these names have huge potential, with tens and even hundreds of thousands of searches (particularly impressive when looking at searches on the relevant "phrase") and/or high CPC figures. I wouldn't ever put these names up without a reserve, but when the minimum fee for Bido reserves cost $30 a pop, I didn't feel comfortable putting them on Bido... until now.

Because these have reserves on them, I feel more motivated to reach out to end users for these domains than I have with the last several of my Bido auctions. I'm not sure why that is, except that I know I won't get screwed over by a poor auction turn out. We'll see how those promotion efforts turn out. But anyway, here's the list.

SpecialEffects.TV - According to Google's adword tool, an estimated 301,000 searches include the phrase "Special Effects" each month. 40,000 exacts! Reserve is under $1k.
KissimmeeHotels.us - 110,000 exact searches on Kissimmee Hotels last month. The place to stay for all the Orlando attractions. Reserve is under $1k.
FauxFur.us - 450,000 searches for "Faux Fur" and it's related products each month. Reserve is under $500!
AdjustableRateMortgage.us - 27,000 searches using the "phrase" with a CPC of over $9! Reserve is under $500 on this one, too.
BuyCubicZirconia.com - 823,000 searches include the phrase "Cubic Zirconia" each month. This site can cover them all, from rings to necklaces, earrings to bracelets. This was going to have a reserve for the full $1k, but for this first trial run, the reserve is under $500!

Let me know what you think of the names and the reserves at http://twitter.com/UtterDomain.

Bido's latest feature - get free stuff!

While I'm not sure how many spots are left, Bido is giving away free credits (more on these in a minute) to the first 100 people that tweet what the best deal was on Bido for October. If you want a free Bido Credit, post a Tweet in the following format:
<your bido nickname> says <the name that sold> for <the closing price> was the best deal @bido in October - followed by the link to the Auction.

So for example, my tweet would say:

theoretical says NassauFlights.com for $101 was the best deal @bido in October http://www.bido.com/Auction?name=nassauflights.com

For a full list of sales in October, click here.
That's it. Your bido account will get the free credit which you can use one of two ways:

- Accelerate your domain to auction. This means that you can submit a name to Bido and use your credit to bypass the process of having to wait for community votes. If your name is really good though, it doesn't hurt to wait a few days to see if you get enough votes the "natural" way - by letting Bido members vote on your name.
- You can use the credit to set a reserve price for your auction. This is new and it's huge. Each credit you spend on your auction gives you a cap of $1000 in reserve price. So if you spend your 1 free credit, you can set your reserve price at say $900. If you use 3 credits, you can set a reserve price of, say, $2500. Don't feel like you have to use the whole $1000, as you want to use a fair and attractive reserve in order to get bidders bidding. Also, there's a cap of 10 credits for a single auction, so for just 10 credits you can set whatever reserve you want.

Why is this important - you could set a reserve for Bido auctions before, right? Well, the key here is price and ease of use. For a few bucks you can now use Bido to list your high three and four figure domain names. If the name sells, you get your credits back! If the name doesn't reach your reserve, you still have the option to take the highest bid. The whole process is much cheaper than the fees that were imposed before, which was a minimum of $30 bucks or %3 of your reserve price, whichever was greater. That meant that it wasn't practical to list high mid to high figure names before and no one would ever consider listing five figure names because the price of failure was too high.

Now, bringing in a reasonable way to have fairly priced reserve auctions into Bido isn't a panacea. There are still issues. But it may very well solve the biggest issue, which is the lack of high quality names available on the platform. The saying "a rising tide lifts all boats" is quite appropriate. I'm excited about the change and I'm ready to start spending my credits. What names are you going to list? Talk back at http://twitter.com/UtterDomain

The Problems with Bido

Well, Sahar, you asked for it :) - over on the Conceptualist.com. Before I start though, I really do appreciate Bido, I have a tremendous amount of respect for the people behind it and I am thankful that they are so willing to listen to criticism to create a better product. Okay, here it goes:

• Copyrights - or rather, the lack of concern there of by all parties. It degrades the experience when I see Bido pushing clear trademark violations - often times many per day! There should be a report abuse button or something in the voting because there are some really obvious issues (and some obvious typos too), that should be visible to anyone who would unknowingly bid on the name.


• Garbage in/Garbage out - there needs to be tighter limits on how many names you can submit and the number of domains at auction per day. The broader they expand these, the worse the quality gets, the hard it is to stand out and the lower the average sales price is going to be. The only person that benefits are buyers, and with so many auctions and so few buyers, you end up getting buyers fatigue.


• Not enough rewards in place for comments and votes - there are lots of ideas here, and you want to promote helpful comments and accurate votes so maybe base it on the final sales price of the name as a sort of weighted scale (if you vote for a name that doesn't sell at all for example, you get no reward from that vote). There are lots of possible rewards too, from increased weight on your votes if you are a good voter or acceleration credits, to more subtle benefits such as a more fairly ordered list of "experts" based on the quality feedback received for comments.


• The transition from one domain a day has been rough - yes, there are benefits to going to multiple auctions but you've lost of lot of followers in the process. Things that still suffer include: lack of chat (too spread out and having to switch rooms constantly wasn't fun), lack of comments (it's hard to find comments for one thing as there are so many auctions), lack of quality and lack of focus.
  


• I want more flexibility on reserve prices without having such stringent penalties in place. I'm the one who suffers if it doesn't sell. That's penalty enough I think. A fixed price for sending a domain to auction with a reserve or higher percentage charge for sales completed with a reserve are fine solutions, but the sliding scale thing is scary and I won't do it until it's less severe.


• Affiliates - there's absolutely no benefit to me to promote your auctions, and therefore I'll promote other marketplaces where I have the potential to earn a reward for helping you market your domains.


• Direct link to vote for submitted domains. I should be able to say "hey, this is a cool domain, vote on it", even if it's not my own domain. Right now that process is really difficult to do and so people resort to more backdoor means to get votes. Of course, if you limit the number of submissions, this wouldn't be as big of a deal, but it's so easy to get lost in the mix. Have you I mentioned you should limit submissions A LOT!?


• Prioritized/featured domains for the day: Either include a voting mechanism, a paid for service or hand pick them but we need a way to promote the domains that are likely to do well but that get lost in the shuffle. The promotion should be significant, not just a star beside the name, but serious "these are the names of the day" kind of deal right there at the top of the front page.


• There have been significant improvements to the communication and transfer of domains in the new peer to peer style, but it's crazy waiting weeks to get payment AFTER you've already pushed the name just because the buyer hasn't clicked that they've accepted it. I don't know if that means that peer to peer will never work, but it's really quite frustrating right now.

That's it. I hope this list helps. I focused on the negative because that's what you were looking for but I do like the platform and I do want to see it succeed. It just has a ways to go!

.US Domain Auctions at Bido today at 1pm

We've gotten a lot of positive feedback from our Shoot.us press release, but we actually have 3 domains going up for auction today, all for no reserve:

Shoot.us - This is a great brandable domain, a premium keyword with 100,000,000 Google results. This domain could easily be used for wedding or portrait photography, hunting and sport shooting webzines, video games and much more. Owning short, prime one word domains in any extension can also be a great investment, and with this clever domain hack, you never have to worry about whether the .US extension continues to climb in value as it will always "just make sense". UPDATE: Sold for $114. Great Deal!

BeachfrontHotels.us - One of the most popular uses of the .US extension is for international tourists looking to get information about US products, hotels and travel information. This domain fits perfectly into that market and there are a wide array of potential revenue sources for this domain: CPA commissions from just a handful of vacations will likely pay for the acquisition cost of this domain. You could also sell direct advertising to hoteliers, travel agents and more. If you are lazy, there are literally hundreds of PPC advertisers according to Estibot so you can just throw in some Adsense for good measure! UPDATE: Sold for $30. A little disappointed in this one.

SaltwaterFish.us - One of the wisest investments in domains that you can make is in product domains, and this is a category killer. Saltwater aquariums are a huge market with average affiliate sales in the hundreds of dollars. Getting an opportunity to own a generic like this doesn't come along very often! If you are a domain flipper (no pun intended), then the 250+ advertisers on this term is a good indication that you'll have plenty of potential end users. UPDATE: Sold for $186. I'm curious to see what happens with this one.

We'll have more exciting names auctioned at Bido in the next couple of days. Be sure to check out LiveWebCams.us tomorrow!

Shoot.us Domain Auction Press Release

I'm preparing for the shoot.us auction on Bido on July 30th. There are a number of people who have comparable names, who have expressed interest in the name or have relevant businesses that could capitalize on a great brandable name like shoot.us that I have been contacting via email along the lines of the following:

I apologize for the unsolicited email, but I'm the owner of a domain you may be interested in - Shoot.us. The domain is going up for auction with no reserve at the auction site Bido.com. This is a special auction that only lasts one hour and the domain will sell (it may sell for as little as $1). The auction will start on July 30th at 1:23pm EST, but you can put in a pre-Bid anytime between now and then. If your pre-Bid ends up winning, you get 2% cashback through Bido. If you are not interested in the domain, I'm sorry for taking your time. If you have any questions or issues, please let me know.
Here is the link to the auction: http://www.bido.com/Auction?name=shoot.us
All the best,

I've also produced a press release on PR.com for free that will be released next week. It's a bit cheesy and I may do a separate press release with a more serious tone the day before the auction. Here's the text of the release:

Theoretical Games is excited to announce that the hit domain name Shoot.us is going to be auctioned at No Reserve at the Bido.com auction site. This special auction will start on July 30th at 1:23pm EST and run for exactly one hour. If you are interested in purchasing the domain, you can pre-Bid at Bido.com anytime between now and July 30th. If your pre-Bid wins, you will receive 2% cashback from Bido.com.

The dot US extension is the country code for the United States (like .co.uk is for the United Kingdom) and it is gaining significant popularity with many premium .US domains selling for over ten thousand dollars. But this name is also a clever "domain hack" with the play on words of "Shoot us". Similar domain names, such as Teach.me, Trust.me and Publish.me sold last month at auction for as much as $20,000. This domain name could go for a steal with a $0 reserve!

Shoot.us is perfectly suited for a number of users. Wedding photographers, video producers, hunting clubs and gun stores in the United States, sports shooting publications, video game developers and more could use this clever brand-able domain name to hold their users hostage. With so many barely pronounceable "web 2.0" domains vying for our attention, this short and memorable name could help you stand out from the crowd.

Be sure to tune in to http://www.bido.com/Auction?name=shoot.us as the auction action is sure to blow you away. Be there July 30th at 1:23pm on the East Coast or 10:23am out in the Old West.

I'd love some constructive criticism or advice on how you would market the shoot.us auction. I've got several auctions happening at Bido but this is by far my favorite name of bunch (just don't tell anyone else!)

Appearing on the Bido Show!

I've been asked to be the Guest Speaker for this Thursday's Bido Live Auction chat. If you haven't participated in a Bido chat before, this is not only a great chance to get to know yours truly but also to meet some of the most influential and successful domainers in the industry. The 1 hour Live Auction of Misconception.com will take place this Thursday, June 2nd at 1pm EST. Log in to Bido.com, click the Chat tab for the Misconception.com auction and then click to Join the Chat. You can sign up now for free so you are all set for Thursday and that way you can even get a friendly email reminder when the auction is about to start.

So what is it that I'm going to be talking about? Besides detailing my life story in excruciating detail, we'll be covering two of the biggest things to happen on the internet in our lifetime! First, the newly announced Google Wave and how to capitalize on it... That means we'll be talking about the impending launch of our website, Collaborative-Tools.com, as well. Google Wave is going to change the way we communicate online.

Second, and only slightly less life altering, is the announcement of our Geo Domain project. I'll make the official announcement tomorrow and then we'll have a chance to go into the meaty details about it in the Bido chat on Thursday. So stay tuned! Ugh.. I hate that line. And be sure to join the free live chat this Thursday at 1pm EST.