It’s all of the reasons listed above. End of the year usually means more buyers looking to spend $$$ for tax write offs and other purposes but really the domain aftermarket is struggling as all of the “decent” 2 word keyword domains that are currently priced in the low-mid $x,xxx range are overpriced and will only sell once the prices are slashed 2-3x… The good times are over, boys… 2009 is going to suck. This summer was hot… This winter will be pretty miserable and December will officially kick it off that is my prediction…although I am sure sellers will continue pumping some good names up for grabs but whether they sell at current valuations is a whole different story.

Mike

Owning a portfolio of thousands of high quality domain names I can attest to reason #1. Last summer I pulled my domains from all auctions as I am not willing to let them go below a certain price.

The value a good domain name can generate (traffic, brand, seo advantage, usablity) doesn’t justify letting them go at low dollars especially since they are in short supply. I’m in a position where I can develop them and make more money that way.

If you really look close at the last few auctions of SEDO, Moniker, Snapnames etc. you’ll see a lot of domain names that wouldn’t even make it in my top 98% of domain names.

I usually say if I wouldn’t shell out at least $500.00 to buy them then anything they sell for above that tells me the market is still healthy. With such a dwindling supply of good domain names on auctions these days another reason would be… less people attend/participate in these auctions.

Auctions should start considering ‘domain packages’ -> Groups/Collections of domain names representing the same thing. If I own Newspaper.com and Newspaper.ca, News.com and News.ca would I want to sell just one of them seperately? Not really. So If I wanted to sell the whole package where would I go to do this?

Would this auction be of more interest to a newspaper giant than an auction for NewspaperPublishers.com (Decent domain name but not what the other collection could produce?) on one of the current auctions? I think so.

Why is this important? Simply because, more and more people are collecting/consolidating domain packages to create power and prevent traffic leakage.

That’s my 2 cents.

Ron, good points and I like how you think ;)

All the best,
Mike