Auction participants predict market expansion
What set this auction apart from others is the simultaneous online and live-in-conference bidding. The promoters of this Domain Roundtable conference,
Name Intelligence, Inc. have made this bidding system even better and will be deploying it at future Domain Roundtable events.
Auctions create psychological conditions that encourage premium prices to be paid. At DRC, there were individual domains being auctioned and groups of similar domains being auctioned.
I was at this auction, asking participants what they saw on the horizon for the industry. Uniformly, everyone said that within two years the market will see an inflow of new buyers from the advertising industry. By then, most of the good names will be locked up, forcing late entrants to pay premium prices.
Right now, the advertising industry still has trouble understanding how to monetize the shift to direct search. They also don?t want to give up their existing revenue models.
Another major shift is the combining of the primary and secondary markets through tools such as Afternic?s Domain Listing Service (DLS), which lists fresh domains alongside those in the secondary market. But Afternic has not fully implemented DLS on all participating registrars, especially in terms of having domains for sale by existing owners shown in response to queries on the availability of multiple domain names, which is the way most commercial registrants search before making fresh registrations.