Come on Chris C, your NF love is weird especially as they have almost never paid attention to your good suggestions and have dumped AMA and basically messed up your business model. I am confused by your posts.
I owned AU domains before NetFleet played any significantly role in the AU scene. I thought domains were a good investment before they came along and I think they are still a good investment now. NetFleet's presence hasn't hurt my business model at all because my business model never involved NetFleet and flipping domains.
Over the last 3 or 4 years NetFleet have been the ONLY private stakeholder in this industry that has been innovating and attempting to improve the AU domain market.
So firstly, credit where credit is due - that is why I support them.
Yes they might have had a profit motive for pursuing these developments - but nonetheless most of the industry (including myself) has benefited from their progress.
As for the AMA - don't get me wrong - I was not a prolific user of the AMA - but I did like it there for when I did decide I wanted to liquidate a batch and I think it was a great tool from bring better value domains to the market and helping keep up the industry buzz.
That said, I'm not too worried about the AMA - if their trials are successful I trust that once again the "profit motive" will encourage them to reactivate it.
I'm actually SUPER excited about the prospect of them reopening the AMA with the new system because I think for the first time the AMA system offers owners more incentive to get out there and do some basic marketing of their domains which they have on the AMA.
I remember back in the first version of the AMA I threw up a number of domains and contacted a number of potential buyers for each domain but the ultimate result was I typically only convinced 1 buyer to bid on the domain and given there was only 1 buyer bid they got the domain for the minimum bid (which was $100 at the time).
And I think most of you would agree that cost effectively finding 1 buyer who is willing to turn up to an auction isn't an easy task - getting two buyers to compete for a domain at an auction is extremely hard.
Under the new system, which is more of a tender than auction, those efforts to find even 1 buyer won't be rewarded with a minimum bid...
So I'm kind of excited to see the AMA reopen.
And as I have previously pointed out I think the results that the new system has been achieving thus far have been somewhat better than the old Snapper system, which is always a good thing for sellers.
As for them not listening to my suggestions - it's their business - how they want to run it is up to them.
At the end of the day we live in a competitive, capitalistic business environment - but NetFleet has an effective monopoly in the AU market at the moment so I can't blame them for being apathetic at times - and I don't think we will see the next wave of real innovation and drive in the AU domain industry until they have a serious competitor.
So if there are others out there who feel my ideas are good ideas and would produce better results than NetFleet is achieving they are very welcome to use them and take advantage.
Unfortunately my time, energy and resources are tied up elsewhere so I can't be the champion of change in this area.
Really? What domains have you won in the past 12 days - and what have you lost?
I've just picked up the one for a client a few days ago.
I haven't lost any in the last 12 days.
I won't say what domain - because that's not for me to go disclose. Suffice to say, it was a domain we couldn't afford to lose, but we were reasonably confident there weren't going to be many other bidders out there.
We don't really have enough data at the moment to take a view on whether the new format is more successful or not. We need to crunch the numbers which will we do when we have a large enough sample.
Great to hear.
Do you have any gut feelings about the results at this stage?
Understand the process may not be as exciting as the old system for spectators, and is a clear downside - for us too!
As I've previously mentioned - you could opt to display the number of individual bidders that have bid on the domain - that might create some excitement without revealing the bid prices.
As mentioned, we have not published sales <$1k on the basis many of our clients wanted that - but these will be included in the daily email soon so people have a record - it just won't be visible on the site.
Do you mean the daily email of domains that we bid and won/lost or are you talking about a general daily email summarising the domain sales for that day?
