Well, I once talked to Rick about sponsorship back in the day. The prices were pretty steep. The problem is as someone else mentioned – why spend $50,000 to give a 15 minute key note speech? Your target audience is not potential customers or clients, but mainly competitors actually. It all depends on what kind of business you conduct, but if you are a registrar or domain parking company, then it doesn’t work out well.

Take a few minutes, and I bet you can come up with a much more effective advertising plan for $50,000. It costs like $15,000 to put your company name on a hat. Ridiculous.

I don’t remember the exact prices per-se, but they were pretty steep from what I remember. I have the email, but on a different PC, so I can’t tell you what the prices were. And they could have been in confidence, so I rather not say. :)

My opinion is as follows:

Price is ridiculous. Why would I pay $2000+ to get in, a big 15% or so commission to bid in the auctions, add in a few more hundred or even $1000+ for the hotel stay, not to mention the air line tickets and all the additional expenses such as a) cab, b) food, c) tips? It makes little sense.

Secondly, sponsoring these events could be a tough job, but if you figure how much commission they make off the auctions, it is probably even worth creating your own domain trade conference, giving a FREE ticket for everyone, hell – even free airline tickets, and still make a huge profit off of the auctions.

And that’s probably why their business is going downhill. Many in the industry started their own trade shows because they realized that running it is not really that difficult, and the revenue is pretty big. These conferences make money off of a) sponsors b) auctions, and c) entrance tickets. They can at least give us a break with c). Until TRAFFIC completely removes the entrance tickets – I will never attend that show. There’s little reason to anyway – since in reality most of these shows just waste my time. Do I really want to hear CEO of X and Y tell me their opinions on the current market and what THEIR business has planned for the future? No. This could be different for others, but I like to take a look at the industry news once a week, and take in the bigger news that may affect me/my business/my clients in the future.

So at the end of the day, DomainNameNews is one of the only resources I need. And like someone said, you can bid on domains in these auctions from your bathroom if you want to.

before, you had to goto the shows to bid at auctions…now, you can just bid from home…so why go..other than to meet people and get your drink on…

The domain business has changed so much in the past year but TRAFFIC has not kept up. After 11 shows you would think they could do better than “you can’t afford not to go” type tag lines. $1500 – $2000 is at the top end of show rates and for what attendees get, it is vastly overpriced.

They stop reading their own press clippings and try and get back in touch with this business. The first show in Delray Beach, FL was ground breaking and exciting, the last couple shows were basically a waste of time. Either change with the times or fade a way.

No one implied in this article or said to me that Moniker was struggling. The topic was regarding the TRAFFIC conference. These are 2 separate entities owned by 2 separate groups.

As for your comments about auctions. ..
“As I’ve said before” . . . I’m not sure where you’ve said this but organizers of these auctions are pushing down reserves as much as they can while at the same time balancing out having good domains for sale. Part of the responsibility of appropriately priced domains lies on the auction house and part of it lies on the owners to be realistic.

Re: the topic of timing and fostering more bidders: All the auction venues have an online bidding component and Moniker has been offering phone-in bidding as well since some of the first auctions. I agree that the marketing isn’t up to par and the lists come out late, but knowing domainers I’d venture that many good domains come in under the wire at the last second. Additionally, most domain owners don’t want to lock the domain into a contract for a lengthy period which would be necessary if any pre-auction promotions were to take place.

You are right there are a lot of things that could use some improvement in the auction space, but in general this article was not about that topic at all.

Thanks for your input though.

As far as Moniker struggling, I think that is all to obvious. As I’ve mentioned before the domain names going up at the auctions these days have reserve prices that are out of reality and the timing of the auction lists don’t foster a domain buying crowd.

When will these auctions realize that the best advertisments for these auctions are the domain names for auction them selves. It is easier to justify a plane ride to New York if I can explain to my marketing head that I am going to try to win the domain name xyz.com. Only problem is the lists come out 15 days before hand living very little time to arrange going. :(

There is tons of room for improvement in the wholw auction arena DomainRoundtable, DomainFest, Moniker, SnapNames and BIDO. These companies are neglecting the fact that their auctions should offer Domain Packages rather than just domain names (By the way it is possible that a Domain Package can contain just one domain name).

If you have a good domain name and decide to buy up the spelling mistakes to prevent leakage, how do you submit these domain names? Will you just sell the main name? Won’t that decrease the value since I will still own the spelling mistakes? Most domain names have spelling mistakes that offer permanent traffic leakage.

There is something to think about.