Just under an hour to go until the start of the cobb.com auction, that is, the auctioning of the domain name "cobb.com" to the highest bidder. It should show up here under Auction Listings.
Not sure if anyone has ever blogged the auctioning of their domain name before (although, given the size of the blogosphere today, it has probably been done many times already).
I did quite a bit of research ahead of time and found a great blog about domain names, Frank Schilling's Seven Mile. Here's an interesting discussion that took place there relative to the value of cobb.com. (And here's Frank's listing in Wikipedia, just in case you don't know who he is, and I admit I didn't until I started looking at the domain market.)
What prompted the discussion was a somewhat embarrassing lack of clarity on my part when I put out a press release about recent domain name values, like strauss.com selling for $50,000 and walkers.com going for $175,000. My intention had been to show the range of values for recent sales of 'last name' domains and perhaps my mistake was to list Tandberg.com going for $1.5M. Some people took that to mean I was asking $1.5M for cobb.com when I would be happy with something closer to walkers.com or maybe even moka.com ($72K). The latter is a good example of a four-letter dot-com name. Even better might be blue.com which was purchased for $500K, but has a more generic appeal.
Anyway, as it turns out, the only reliable way to put a price on a domain name is to sell it. "As in real estate, so in virtual real estate." Even among experts there is a huge range of pre-sale valuations (e.g. I got responses ranging from $40K to $600K in the valuations I commissioned).
So, let the bidding begin. And stay tuned for my reports on how this kind of auction feels when you are on the 'receiving end' so to speak.
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