$1 starting bids droping in Sunday Night live Auctions

[Sharpy]

Bargain Hunters cause drop in frequency of $1 starting bids?
The % of Names that are listed each week with a $1 starting bid has dropped subatantialy over the last 3 weeks. One cause for this is may be that owners are tired of turning domain names over to
"Bargain Hunters"(bottom feeders ) for $1-$2.

Jan 25 34%
Feb 02 55%
Feb 08 64%
Feb 16 63%
Mar 02 81%
Mar 09 72%
Mar 16 77%
Mar 23 50%
Mar 30 41%
April 06 35% (this week)

[Duke]

Actually I think it is a sign of the auction maturing. I was a big booster of $1 starting bids in the opening weeks. I think it was really important to generate interest and get people to log on and see what's happening. The auction is now firmly established.

I didn't really mind selling an occasional name for $1 (though that rarely happened to me), but it really isn't worth the time to send the emails back and forth, make someone PayPal that amount etc.

Also, in my case, in the early weeks of the auction I cleared out nearly all of the names in my portfolio that I wanted to dump. Though I still have several hundred names I am pretty happy with almost all of them, so I am basically out of inventory I want to dump. I would guess this is the case for a lot of people, so fewer $1 opening bids.

I still list names with very reasonable opening bids (ranging from $8 to $49 this week) that reflect the minimum I am willing to let them go for. If everyone does this and avoids absurdly high opening prices the auction will only continue to strengthen.

I see a lot of good names this week. I think we are reaching the happy medium of reasonable opening bids and good names that will make the auction profitable for everyone involved.

[Sharpy]

Good points el Duque