Raffle my domains??

[Dividendinvestor]

First a little ground work before I ask a serious of questions. A few years back I've heard of people who raffled off their house and earned a lot more than the then current market value. In my local town each year the Rotary Club raises money by selling $100 raffle tickets for a brand new porche. They raised a lot of money doing this. I thought to myself, what if there was a way to raffle off my domains? I will list some of my names and throw out some large numbers just for conversation. I own the domain CloudComputing.co. If you don't already know, cloud computing is the future of computing and it is growing like CRAZY and is just now catching on overseas. I know that you can't really compare the .co domain extension to that of .com, everyone knows that of course, but .co is expected to become more and more popular Globally as time goes on. Now, Dell owns the domain CloudComputing.com and uses it for redirection. Citrix Systems recently acquired Cloud.co for a huge amount of money. Some monthe back Amazon.com purchased the domain name Cloud.co for "an undisclosed amount" which if i were to guess might have been somewhere in the neighborhood of $xxx,xxx.00 give or take. So i figure that one day in the future, as the .co domain extension slowly becomes more valuable and popular and the huge growth in Cloud Computing, my CloudComputing.co domain may fetch a very large sum from the right end user.
But what if i do not want to wait say 10 years or so for the right company to make me an offer that is appealing to me? I'm willing to wait 10-15 years if i have to but why? Is there a better way? Then i thought to myself, would it be possible to Raffle off my domain? That is sell raffle tickets? As a small time domainer i do not have the connections that a proffessional domain might have nor the know how of advertising it etc etc. I'm going to use the owner of dnforum in this example. What if i were to enlist the help of the owners of dnforum who may have the connections in the domaining industry necessary to accomplish this goal. What if i made a deal where dnforum would conduct the raffle? They would sell say 1,500 raffle tickets at $100 each. That would raise $150,000. They would pay me $100,000 and keep the other $50,000 for their service? Or if they were able to sell say 2,000 raffle tickets and raise $200,000 and pay me the same $100,000 and keep $100,000 for themselves for their service? The more raffle tickets they sell the more money they make. I would not care what their profit is as long as i get my $100,000! Once they finish selling the raffle tickets they would contact me and we go through Escrow.com. They put up the $100,000 and i initiate the transfer of the domain to them and they are responsible for then transferring the domain to the winner of the raffle! How many people/domainers out there, globally even, would pay $100 for a chance to win the domain name CloudComputing.co which is in a huge industry right now? The winner would have a Great investment on his or her hands that will be appealing to a large tech company in the field of cloud computing.
But wait it gets even better. First off whoever owns the name NatGas.com is asking $400,000 for it at last glance. I own NatGas.co! What if i wanted just 1/16 that price? What if dnforum sells 1,000 raffle tickets at $50 each raising $50,000? They pay me half or $25,000 and they keep the other $25,000 for their services. If they sell more tickets they keep the extra profits and i just get my $25,000! Why should i wait 10 years to sell it for this price? Would you pay $50 for the chance to own NatGas.co?

Or how about this: What if i enlisted dnforum to raffle off the following domains in one single raffle?:

CloudComputing.co
CloudTechnology.co
NatGas.co
CleanEnergy.co
FuelCells.co

For the best deal dnforum would sell as many raffle tickets as they possibly can at say $100 each. They pay me just $115,000 and Keep whatever extra profits they make. If they are lucky enough to sell 3,000 raffle tickets at $100 each they stand to make a $185,000 profit!!! If they sell more than 3,000 tickets they would make even more profit!

Would you buy a $100 raffle ticket for the chance to own all 5 domains listed above??? Who wouldn't???

I could even throw in 5 more domains: allnatural.co, gosolar.co, getsolar.co, stockoptions.co, and biofuels.co for 10 in all!

I would be a happy camper to get $115,000 for all 5 domains instead of waiting years for the right end user to make me a serious offer. dnforum could make a huge amount for themselves. And the person who wins the raffle would get 5 great domains for buying a single $100 raffle ticket! Appologies to the people who lost the raffle but wasn't it worth the gamble?

If i were to conduct this on my own i may not have the resources, the connections, or the contacts to make this happen. dnforum could make phone calls to professionals in the domain industry, they could advertise on their own sites, they can send mass emails to their current email lists. the only thing i have to do is agree to not sell these 5 domains to anyone else during this time period. I sit back and let dnforum do all the work. When the time comes dnforum contacts me saying they sold enough raffle tickets and raised the cash. We make arrangements through escrow.com where they pay me the $115,000 for the 5 domains and i initiate transfer to them. They are responsible for conducting the raffle and then awarding the winner the 5 domains and transfering the 5 domains to the winner after i transfer them to dnforum upon payment. I am not responsible for any costs whatsover along the way even if it turns out to be a flop!

Of course this is all hypothetical. I only used dnforum as an example. What if they have no interrest in this? My question now is. Does this sound exciting to dnforum? Is it even possible to carry this out? who among the members of this forum would be willing to buy a $100 raffle ticket for the chance to win these 5 domains? To dnforum, if you are reading this, do your due diligence and make some preliminary phone calls to see if this is a good idea. Of course, the mechanics of this would all need to be worked out etc.

i look forward to everyones thoughts on this. I'm sure there may be some negative ones too. Like i said this is all just an idea.

Eric

[randomo]

Raffle laws vary by state and city, and online raffles probably have another layer of legal [im]permissibility. What you are proposing is interesting, but you need to find out whether it is legal.

[Dale Hubbard]

Speaking from experience on this (in the UK; and probably applicable in the USA), your model is fraught with legal/jurisdictional problems. We got over it by turning it into a 'competition' whereby the entrant has to answer a series of questions - not too onerous - but questions that can't really be answered by a simple net search. Our solution was 'spot the ball' - I don't know if you've heard of that in the USA, but here's an example link...

http://www.botb.com

If you're running a country-wide 'raffle', you're essentially running a lottery and the legals are complex, especially state-by-state.

Best of luck - I admire your ingenuity!

[britishbulldog]

So much corruption in this industry that i would not spend $100 on any raffle ticket relating to domains,Good Luck !

[bmugford]

As other users have said I am not sure about the legalities.

Also, I think you would need to have some pretty strong generic .COM to sell any significant amount of tickets.

Brad

[David G]

The chance of getting domainers to buy a $100 raffle ticket for 2 word .co names is slim to none, imo. In fact, not even sure if the name would even SELL for more than mid $xxx. It appears the vast majority of high-end .co sales have been for single word common dictionary names heavily owned by Michael Mann (not 2 word new technology names like this one).

[barrysanders]

Raffling stuff is mostly illegal unless you are a non-profit or something along those lines unless you have a good lawyer who handles the legal aspects of it and jumps through the hoops. I know the raffling of houses has occured, but I'm sure that was not an easy thing to set up and there were problem strict rules in place.

If this were easy I would buy a brand new Mustang for $30k, and sell 350 raffle tickets for $100 each, and do this every other day, and do the raffle through a live webstream and then hire someone else to run this for me ongoing and i would retire.

Granted, a site like Quibids is essentially doing this in this own spun way, and they have run into some regulatory problems (though their site is still going). We'll see how that shakes out, though I don't think selling a $500 iPad for thousands of dollars is going to be considered legal.