When FanBase.com broke past the $100k mark on Go Daddy auctions I thought something fishy might be going on. While expired domains do sell for low five-figures all the time, getting into the high five-figure range is rare, and six-figures, well it almost never happens.
While I think FanBase.com is a solid name, I personally don’t think it’s worth six-figures to an end user, and definitely not to an investor that’s trying to buy the name at wholesale. I first read about the sale on Elliot’s blog, DomainInvesting.com and he shared some stats about the auction in his post that I thought I’d share below:
The expiry auction for Fanbase.com ended today at GoDaddy Auctions, and the domain name sold for $151,000. There were 229 bids placed from 29 bidders in the three day expiry auction.
The sale of Fanbase.com is the largest expiry auction at GoDaddy Auctions that I can recall. In looking at NameBio, the next three highest value expiry auctions at GoDaddy in the last 5 years include:
CTX.com – $139,001
(Source – DomainInvesting.com)
DAE.com – $126,000
Gradient.com – $125,001
Like I said above, while I think FanBase.com is a solid name, it’s not in the same league as something like Gradient.com that I think makes sense with a six-figure price next to it.
Update – when I originally wrote this post I misread a tweet and thought the winning bidder had not paid. Paul Nicks from Go Daddy corrected me, and this post has been updated to reflect the fact that yes, the bidder paid and FanBase.com did indeed sell for $151,000.
What do you think, in the end is $151k a good price for this name or did the new owner overpay? My two cents is that if it’s an end-user, the price seems high, if it’s a domain investor trying to buy wholesale, then the price is really high.
I really don’t care about this domain specifically, but once again it shows a glaring problem with GD expired auctions that has existed for many years. It is unbelievable that this stuff is still going on.
Because of the way the system is designed it basically invites bidders to run the auction up well past fair market value, then someone will get a major deal when all those bids are removed.
Let’s say you have a domain that might sell for $10K . You can have a few bidders run it up from $2K to $25K easily. Since the bidders ran it way past market value, no legit bidders were able to bid. When all the bids are removed one of the bidders gets it way below market value.
This can happen on any scale. All it takes is a handful of bidders running a domain up past market value, then the top bidders do not pay.
If you can’t trust the final bid prices, it has hard to trust the integrity of the venue. There is often a major disconnect between the final bid price and the actual price paid. It is a major reason I no longer user GD expired auctions.
I am a GoDaddy customer. I like Paul, Joe, and everyone else there. However, it is long overdue that this nonsense is stopped and the broken system is fixed.
Brad