3 Letter .com at BIDO – $1 Reserve
By Alan on Feb 28, 2009 in bido
What a nice surprise to get online for a few minutes and see a 3 letter .com coming up for auction at BIDO with a $1 reserve. Sweet – that’s what I call trust in an auction house to provide value to the seller and quality to the marketplace.
Kudos Sahar and everybody else at BIDO.
Now, to give credit where credit is due. A couple days I wrote a post about some frustration with BIDO’s quality of domains in auction. I know Sahar a little bit but we are certainly not college roommates. Some would have only seen the negative in the article but Sahar took it as constructive criticism explaining some of the plans for BIDO and why some of the quality problems existed (seller submissions a big factor).
Some of those who blog take an article out of context immediately and then post a retribution to the author’s comments – others have a bad day with an account rep and then publicly display the private comments (which I would immediately stop doing business with you regardless of the cost if I was the rep) but others like Sahar just try to offer an explanation and some good points about what’s in the big picture.
Maybe my comments touched a few places, maybe they never – who knows and really doesn’t matter to me since I have no grand illusions of people listening to what I write – but I do know Sahar has class so Kudos once again for getting a quality name to BIDO.
As I said in my comments, let’s just hope it’s not followed by applesaucebobbleheads.com the next day 
Cheers
Alan
Jacob | Feb 28, 2009 | Reply
It’s good to see a good name come up, but still, their quality of names sucks. They need to put their money where their mouth is and auction off some of their own names that are halfway decent. They are showing no faith in their system by actually putting to auction names like buycheaply.com, myentitlement.com, etc.
DOm | Feb 28, 2009 | Reply
I think it is an in House domain, how much do you think it will go for ?
Jarred | Feb 28, 2009 | Reply
Thank you for the kind words Alan! We’re stepping up to the plate by auctioning a series of three letter dot com domains on Bido over the course of the next several weeks. The community demanded higher quality domains on Bido, and so we stepped up to the plate and infused them.
The idea is that we hope this causes a wave of confidence with the sellers to submit names of higher quality. We know there are sellers out there watching and waiting for the right time to sell their domains when they feel the momentum is right, and so like we did for a short while to kickstart the system when we initially launched Bido (prior to our several month hiatus of no auctions), we’ve raised the quality bar with this decision to sell a series of three letter dot com domains. We have total faith in our system and we also would like to see the quality of names go up as well.
We did upset the audience a couple of days ago with the MyAstrologist.com sale for $590 when some thought it was near worthless, and so quality obviously means different things to different people.
On another note, we detected the link in your blog post and approved the link back. Take a look just above the Expert Commentaries section:
http://www.bido.com/Auction?name=zjp.com
This refback system is one of the new features of Bido and we hope you enjoy the link, “right back at cha”.
Have a great weekend!
Jarred
Domain Superstar | Feb 28, 2009 | Reply
Just wanted to add my support for the higher quality domain names. Good work, and hope it’s a good sign of things to come!
Dot Us | Feb 28, 2009 | Reply
Yep there names need to be better for them to suceed.
Never going to make enough money to justify the advertising, let alone make a profit.
This name may sell for $5800 ? or there abouts.
Just over $500 commision, the people who own it are smart and succesfull, but i think this is going to be a long road till they make any money.
Good luck though.
Great idea, just need $50-$60K names.
Alan | Feb 28, 2009 | Reply
Dom / Dot us:
no idea about values about 3 letter names. The marketplace loves them – we stay away from them unless they are relevant to our business.
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Jarred
“quality obviously means different things to different people” … so on the money here – have you seen the junk that sells every week on DNJournal’s report lol.
Great thing about BIDO is you do have some people with good knowledge of what constitutes a good domain as expert commentaries so it’s nice to see various opinions to help others weed out the “fools gold” domains. This industry is always searching for a standard of comparable values but unfortunately it’s the ultimate goose chase. Without revenue to compare (such as parking) the only comparable is how much its worth to the buyer so for that reason only comparables are impossible to determine.
Good job on adding the 3 letter domains!
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Dot Us
“Never going to make enough money to justify the advertising, let alone make a profit”
Lets use simple math. Sell 300 domains a year at $3,000 a piece that’s $900,000. say 10% commission (not sure what the rate is at BIDO) that’s 90k.
I’m pretty sure Sahar and Jarred’s plan is much bigger than what we see. 90k is not a lot of money to invest this much time and effort in. Sure, if you’re working at McDonalds it seems like a lot but its really small money and the 90k number is based on a pretty aggressive average sales price for the number of auctions per year.
Wait and see what they launch over the next while – dollar for dollar ads vs revenue can never be compared when the long term plan is not known. You have to spend money to make money.
Sahar sarid | Feb 28, 2009 | Reply
Hola amigos from jaco beach, costa rrrrica
So darren Cleveland, rmg CEO and co founder, and I are here for the weekend. As u can imagine, hard at work !
Thanks for all the support guys. Like I wrote on here before, I’m ecstatic to see even 55$ sales on bido. While it does not constitute quality to many for us it indicates an amazing roi for the individual investor.
As always, we’re listening all the time.
Take care all, will try to post some pics on my blog Sunday from our “weekend office meetings”
Sahar
Alan | Feb 28, 2009 | Reply
and in a fleeting moment all the proceeds from BIDO’ $55 sale are gone to a margarita on the beach …
Enjoy !
Justin | May 11, 2009 | Reply
It’s good to see some quality domains on Bido but on the other hand, there are an overwhelming amount of very poor quality domains chosen as well. From one extreme to another. The platform is great, the chat is great but I’m not yet sold on the quality and end prices for some of these domains. If they keep this up, it’s like shooting themselves in the foot after all the hype… I know I’m losing interest quickly.