Auctions

A number of domainers have written lately about the art of running auctions.

Just copy what other industries are doing - industries that have a longer track record with auctions.

For example, take last week's Christie's auction of the YSL/Pierre Berge collection. It was by all means a success with sales of almost half a billion dollars, including record sales of 2 Mondrians for 17 and 26 million dollars.

What made the auction so successful?

• Branding. You trust that Christie's auctions are of the highest quality. Together with the YSL brand this attracted the right buyers.
• Clients. Many of the winning bids came from long-standing collectors in Europe and the US, who know that you buy in the teeth of a crisis. They are all in Christie's rolodex and marketed to actively.
• Screening. Parts of the collection where not even accepted. In order to be allowed to the auction room, you had to demonstrate disposable funds of 600,000 dollars. Scarcity creates attraction.
  

Now, I would not want to suggest that domain auctions will ever be as exciting as art auction, but the same patterns of success can be found in many other industries. Just look at auctions for baseball cards, car license plates, radio spectrums. There is a lot to learn.

Two new sites launched

I'm excited that we launched two sites this week, and it's not even Friday yet! The first is Danske Virksomheder, the Danish version of our Denmark business directory. I really like what our French multitalent has done with the theme of this site. We are learning a lot very quickly what works and what does not work when developing and marketing local business directories, so it will be very interesting to see how far we can take this site.

The second site is witU - restaurant booking. I am convinced that online restaurant booking is going to become a market as important as hotel or flight booking. We are currently operating witU with LiveBookings as bookings partner but plan to expand to other partner in the near future. WitU already has cool features such as as an automatic Twitter update when you submit a review, but we are going to add a lot more over the next months. We are also developing an iPhone application to go along with it.

Congrats to the team, thanks for all the hard work, and looking forward to the next launches. :)

The Power of SEO

Search for "Tokyo Sushi" on Google.de and you come to the restaurant Tokyo Sushi on our Slovakia website. Funny. Just need to get to the same point with Denmark.net now.