Domainer's Gazette-Home

For all of you out there bidding on domain auctions within Snapnames.com, whether you’re a domainer looking to add to your empire, or simply an original domain owner attempting to re-capture a domain you lost, here’s a quick note regarding some bidders you may face up against inside the Snapnames bidding war. These are the guys *I* regularly face up against - and regularly lose to - cause they have very deep pockets. When an auction begins, and I *don’t* see their name on the bidder board, I give a small sigh or relief, cause it means I may be able to acquire the domain at a semi-reasonable amount. Below are their bidding names, along with a short commentary and typical bid range each buyer usually stays within (in case you want to know if ‘X’ bidder might bid to as high as ‘Y’.

vaxis - this bidder does-not-mess-around. In other words, they’ll throw thousand dollar bids around like they’re throwing nickels in slot machines. From the past year, here are a few final purchase prices they’ve spent to acquire domains: $13,711; $7,326; $7,210; $6,868; $6,566

benfranklin - equally as competitive as vaxis, and typically goes after high value domains (dictionary terms, old caput businesses ie.pressplay.com). Vaxis and benfranklin regularly bid against each other, and the amounts zip into the thousand dollar range before you can hit the refresh button on your browser. Here are a few of their actual purchase prices over the past year: $5,088; $4,100; $2,395; $2,102. Note, in reference to all vaxis’ winning bids, typically, it’s benfranklin right behind them losing the auction, so in many cases, benfranklin has bid up to $12K or $13k.

caseytoni - I’m regularly competing with caseytoni on domains that vaxis or benfranklin ignore. They tend to be more of a bulk domain buyer, so you may come across their name more regularly. Their bid range is typically under the $2K mark, with a majority of wins being in the $1K range.

bonkers + bonkerstwo - these are two separate bidders, and I’m grouping them together since they seem to be partners of some sort. Aggressive bidders though. I regularly see auction wins in amounts of $3K to $7K. The highest win I’ve seen of theirs is $25K.

praynxs / appenio / openbid - these bidders represent the mid-tier bidders, typically throwing around bids in the $0 - $1K range. If you’re willing to spend up to $1K for a domain, and are up against one of these three, you should be able to capture it.

Now, even a more interesting question is, WHO are all these bidders? I read somewhere that vaxis was short for a company called ‘Vertical Axis’, and I found one small article regarding a domain they have to give up. The others, I have no idea. Probably are large domain companies like Marchex scooping them up.

The one thing I *can* answer regarding the domains they acquire, is that - I’d say - 98% become parked. They rarely ever get built out. Is parking domains smart - from a revenue generation standpoint? I’ll save that topic for another post.

Welcome - everybody - to The Domainer’s Gazette. As the saying goes, you don’t seem to know where you’re going unless you understand where you’ve been, so here’s a quick summary how I came to build this site - and what you can expect from this blog in the coming days-weeks-months-and years ahead.

I stumbled into the domaining game by accident, like most others it seems these days. My background over the past 10 years has mainly been tied to the SEM market - launching, managing, optimizing, and analyzing paid search campaigns for mid to large companies in and around the Atlanta area. Even helped build an SEM software application to centrally manage AdWords, YSM, and MSN adCenter. But I always knew paid search was only covering one side of the coin, and for me to compete and educate myself, I knew I had to get exposed to the SEO side. This was back in 2004.

Having zero exposure to HTML, it was a bit of a climb before I began to understand basic design commands. But as I got a better handle on the language, I was able to - thankfully, be exposed to the literature of two people, Aaron Wall and Jim Boykin. Aaron’s SEO Book taught me Search Engine Optimization from the ground up, and Jim’s blog taught me the nitty-gritty of SEO, the ‘in-the-trenches’ techniques that - if I had hired some random SEO ‘expert’ - would have easily cost me thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars. Both were instrumental in regards to where I am today - and, oddly, I’ve never met either one of them. [UPDATE: I actually got a chance to meet and hang out with Jim Boykin at Pubcon Vegas 2007 … also got a chance to briefly meet Aaron]

So, after building around 20 of my own sites, with brand-spakin new domain names, I ran across Jim’s article about buying old sites. And once I began to realize the importance of old, indexed, heavily back-linked domains names, I got exposed to the domain auction niche of the industry, which includes SnapNames, Pool, and GoDaddy’s TDNAM - SnapNames being the obvious juggernaut due to their relationship with Network Solutions.

So, now here I am two years later, investigating every angle of the domain game, every possible way to monetize domain names - either through parked pages, affiliate CPA deals, contextual advertising, or hocking them in on message boards or live auctions at the TRAFFIC Conferences.

So, that’s where I am today. Looking forward, I plan to cover all things domain, and hopefully provide some of my own personal insights along with a few clever tips or tricks to help - as much as Jim and Aaron helped me in my early days. Stay tuned!