Over the last year as Flippa has gotten more entrenched in domain only sales, the bulk sale has become popular. Instead of just putting one domain for sale, sellers have looked to move a whole portfolio of related or unrelated domain names.
Traditionally this technique has been a tool of a place like Namepros or DNF. Forums have always made sense because there is the freedom to post what you like, Sedo or Afternic don't have the ability to promote the bulk sale. Newer aftermarkets like DomainNameSales.com also focus on the individual sale, and that makes sense for these types of venues.
Ebay would be the other place to see these types of bulk sales but there is nowhere near the focus on Ebay as there once was when it comes to domain names.
One of the reasons some sellers have told me they go the bulk route is to save on the fees at Flippa, with the leadership of Kevin Fink (@FlippaDomains) they have sought to bring down pricing and simplify it. Still the bulk sale seems to be a favorite for some Flippa sellers.
I never loved the bulk route on an unrelated portfolio of domain names. The problem as I see it is you have one name I like but you are not willing to sell individually, so I have to bid and have names that I don't want drive the price of the auction up. This happens in private sales as well, I have had clients I broker names for say they will only sell in bulk, it has cost business as I once had a guy with 29 .tv domains, these were all unrelated, so there was no network effect or "Hey they will help market your business in other locations"
29 is a lot of names, obviously that many names the seller wanted a good piece of change, I had a buyer for one name at $2,000, now the cost per domain broke down to like $800 as a package but the seller refused to break up the bulk lot. This made no sense to me since he was getting two and a half times his average price per name.
His thought was that the name helped bring up the overall quality of the portfolio so he did not want to break up the portfolio. He never sold any and eventually dropped more than half of the names in the bulk deal.
Now I believe you can find value in bulk portfolio sales, I remember an auction listing that I didn't look real hard at and some of the names were just reg fee fodder, but there was one name that I would have paid $150 for which is where the auction closed. So I could have given away some of the names for free or sold them off for $5 a piece and had the name I wanted for less than what I would have paid. So it can make sense to watch them, of course handling the push of 100 names might not be everyone's cup of tea.
So I have been looking at some Flippa bulk auctions, how they closed, average price per domain, etc...
URLE.com There was a portfolio of 283 domains with URLE.com as the featured domain in the listing headlines.
There were 116 bids and the auction closed at $5,605. This worked out to $19.80 per domain.This portfolio was diverse with a nice 4L.com like URLE.com, long tail domains, geo location of non popular tourist areas, one word names like uMagnet.com. You can click the link to see the portfolio.
So there were names that were not worth $19.80 in there and names that were worth xxx,or possibly more to the right end user, so to clear things out maybe this was the right move, but taking the good names and marketing them and dropping the bad so as to save money on the renewal fees may have been a better approach. Still they may have just wanted out and did not have the time so $5,605 is not bad
Sapphire.US This was a portfolio of 25 .us domain names. There were 65 bids and the auction closed at $855. So the price per name was $34.70. There were certainly some very nice .us domain names like Puppy.us, HDTV.us and Lady.us. Of course .US has not been sizzling in the sales department, I think the buyer can turn a profit on this portfolio buy as some names imo are certainly worth $750 to $1,500.
YLow.com This was a portfolio of 9 LLLL.com domains. There were 8 bids and the auction closed at $405. So the price per name was $45. These types of bulk auctions make sense to me in that they are all the same niche and you have buyers looking to buy 4L.com in bulk.
CheapComputers.org this was an auction that was com/net/org/info/co domain names. There were 87 names that sold for $156, there were 34 bids. This was a short auction only five days long. The average price per name was $1.79.
SongDownloads.net This was an aged .net EMD portfolio. 20 domains. The auction closed at $211 with 34 bids. The price per domain worked out to $10.55
So how do you feel when it comes to the bulk portfolio auction ? Do you like it as a buyer, a seller or neither ?