Here is a round up of some recent events / articles that I found interesting – hope you do too.
.au Domain Name Suppliers’ Code of Practice
I’ve never properly read through this auDA policy previously. I was doing some research yesterday which caused me to examine it in detail.
There are some provisions in this policy that I was never aware of! It covers a multitude of events, and is worth a read.
This one is particularly far reaching in my opinion:
“2.1 The objective of the Code is to promote and protect the interests of the Domain Name registration industry, Domain Name Suppliers, Registrants and Customers by:”
e) preventing practices that undermine the reputation of the industry and the interests of Registrants and Customers;
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Tale Of Three Drop Catchers
Some interesting results on the domain auctions yesterday. The four most popular domains were crave.com.au; shadesails.com.au; freewifi.com.au and businesscapital.com.au.
Netfleet were the successful bidding platform on three of the domains – but the screenshots below show the difference between a blind bidding platform (Netfleet); and an open bidding platform (Drop.com.au). I bet the top bidders on Drop were wishing for their success! There were no apparent bids on Drop for businesscapital.com.au – which probably means that it could have been snared for $1 on that platform if they had been successful.
Domain Shield hasn’t caught many decent domains recently, however they were successful with shadesails.com.au yesterday (I am presuming that the bid was $1600 inclusive of registration and GST – though I might be wrong).
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Five Reasons Every Small Business Needs a Website
Read this article on Verisign’s “Between the Dots” publication yesterday. That title sounds familiar – AusRegistry’s publication is called “Behind the Dot”. LOL! 🙂
Some good takeways in this article. These can be used in our local market when we are trying to motivate people to buy domain names to use for their businesses.
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If you have any comments on any of the above, I’d love to hear them.
Should you have any suggestions for future stories – or any “hot news”, please let me know.
Best wishes for your online success.
I love your example of the blind Netfleet platform versus the transparent Drop platform.
The Drop platform shows the real wholesale price of an Australian domain name. And using my own retail pricing system (retail price is ten times the drop-wholesale price) makes sense in this case.
Crave.com.au should have been bought for $240. That’s what it’s really worth wholesale. Ten times that amount is $2400 and that is a reasonable minimum retail price for such a great name. (Really you could get $4000 to $7000 for this in my opinion to a very hungry end-user, but they would be overpaying.)
Think about it. As a domainer, if you paid $240 for this name, if you were pushed, you’d be happy to get $2400 for it.
On the other hand, whoever paid $1290 for it on Netfleet, hopefully they’re an end-user, because I highly doubt it would ever sell for $12,900 in the next 12 months.
And think about that. If you paid $1290 for it on Netfleet, there’s no way you’d be settling for $2400 retail.
Netfleet’s system is an overinflated joke, specifically designed to over-choke the price of domains. If domains weren’t choked to such high prices on the wholesale drop system, they wouldn’t have to be so expensive on the retail side, which sees less retail sales. No wonder some Domainers are looked-on as overcharging thugs. What choice do they have when they initially have to pay crazy Netfleet secret prices to secure the name in the first place?
It all starts with over-clocking the name at the drops, at the wholesale price. There’s a flow-on effect of blown out prices, which sees less sales to end-users.
Change your dirty system Netfleet for the sake of the future of the AU domain name industry!
I think I just heard the Lye brothers laugh out loud.
@David – about what in particular?