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Domain Shane Announces DSAD Ending Relationship With Flippa

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Silentptnr

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I guess Flippa customer support must be pretty bad. I have alot of respect for Shane Cultra and if he says the service is bad, I believe him. Here's what he said today...
DSAD will be ending our relationship with Flippa as of today. It’s not because they aren’t advertising with us. That only ended the advertising relationship part. Its because I can’t get anyone to communicate with us at all. It got to the point where I had to message one of the founders on LinkedIn. Then I felt like I was spamming him but I didn’t have anyone else to contact. He did what all people that don’t want to be bothered do, and said he would have someone contact me . Months later and a few followups…..nothing. I feel like Flippa for domains is an afterthought. The only thing that kept it afloat was Kevin Fink. He did everything and now that he is gone its like a cruise ship floating abandoned in the ocean. The owners have moved on to other ventures. Other boats. They are smart entrepreneurs and have made good money and have moved on to their next big project.
Read the full article here: https://dsad.com/domain-shanes-daily-list-domains-auction-wednesday-march-22nd/
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
Holy crap. Most informative.
 
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Not really sure why this is news.
 
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Not really sure why this is news.
NEWS
noun
  1. newly received or noteworthy information, especially about recent events.
  2. a broadcast or published report of news.
  3. information not previously known to (someone).
 
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NEWS
noun
  1. newly received or noteworthy information, especially about recent events.
  2. a broadcast or published report of news.
  3. information not previously known to (someone).
Sorry I should have said "useful news"
 
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"noteworthy information" is subjective :)
 
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The Flippa Domains trend definitely isn't positive, see the chart below. The green line is the total dollar volume they were doing per month, and the corresponding trendline shows a steep decline from more than $360k to around $180k. The red line is the number of sales they were closing per month at $100 and above, with a trendline showing a steep decline going from around 380 to right around 200.

But then you get to the blue line which is the number of sales per month below $100. You'll notice the trendline for that is almost perfectly flat. From this data it is clear that they're losing almost all of their dollar volume from higher-end sales. Basically they're becoming a place to burn trash more so than they've ever been.

Please note the graph excludes outlier sales of $50k+, of which there were 10 in 2015, 3 in 2016, and none so far in 2017. This would have made the green trendline have an even steeper negative slope. Also note that Kevin left Flippa in January, and since then we have not received any data on auctions that did not complete. This means there are more sales in our database for 2017 than there should be, which would have caused the blue and red trendlines to be even steeper negative.

flippa-trend.jpg


Not a pretty sight. I'm also told that they canceled their advertising on every single domain industry site, including ours as of March 1st, which means they aren't spending money driving visitors to your listings (except through their affiliate program). Don't get me started on the affiliate program either, when they got rid of premium and ultra-premium listing packages they broke the affiliate program and it stopped paying for listing upgrades (newsletter feature, home page feature, etc). They were made aware of the problem 14 months ago and still haven't fixed it, I don't believe they intend to either, even though their "partners" are getting screwed.

They acquired DomainHoldings which mostly just served to pump a bunch of overpriced, reserve inventory into the marketplace. Then they increased their commission by 50% from 10% to 15%. They gave Kevin the boot, a guy who was unarguably their best employee and the only one who paid any attention to us domainers.

It's not all bad though. During the past two years they rolled out the portfolio functionality, got rid of unlimited free re-listings which served to reduce the noise significantly, created much better search functionality, and probably some other things I'm forgetting. I really wish them the best, because as Shane said we need as many venues as possible to bring us liquidity. But in my view it isn't looking good, the changes they are making are only going to perpetuate (or even worsen) the downward spiral.
 
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Thanks for the news, I was not aware that Kevin left flippa..
 
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Flippa isn't doing good anymore. If you don't believe me check the domains at Editor's Choice. The only thing that kept it afloat was Kevin Fink.
 
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The Flippa Domains trend definitely isn't positive, see the chart below. The green line is the total dollar volume they were doing per month, and the corresponding trendline shows a steep decline from more than $360k to around $180k. The red line is the number of sales they were closing per month at $100 and above, with a trendline showing a steep decline going from around 380 to right around 200.

But then you get to the blue line which is the number of sales per month below $100. You'll notice the trendline for that is almost perfectly flat. From this data it is clear that they're losing almost all of their dollar volume from higher-end sales. Basically they're becoming a place to burn trash more so than they've ever been.

Please note the graph excludes outlier sales of $50k+, of which there were 10 in 2015, 3 in 2016, and none so far in 2017. This would have made the green trendline have an even steeper negative slope. Also note that Kevin left Flippa in January, and since then we have not received any data on auctions that did not complete. This means there are more sales in our database for 2017 than there should be, which would have caused the blue and red trendlines to be even steeper negative.

flippa-trend.jpg


Not a pretty sight. I'm also told that they canceled their advertising on every single domain industry site, including ours as of March 1st, which means they aren't spending money driving visitors to your listings (except through their affiliate program). Don't get me started on the affiliate program either, when they got rid of premium and ultra-premium listing packages they broke the affiliate program and it stopped paying for listing upgrades (newsletter feature, home page feature, etc). They were made aware of the problem 14 months ago and still haven't fixed it, I don't believe they intend to either, even though their "partners" are getting screwed.

They acquired DomainHoldings which mostly just served to pump a bunch of overpriced, reserve inventory into the marketplace. Then they increased their commission by 50% from 10% to 15%. They gave Kevin the boot, a guy who was unarguably their best employee and the only one who paid any attention to us domainers.

It's not all bad though. During the past two years they rolled out the portfolio functionality, got rid of unlimited free re-listings which served to reduce the noise significantly, created much better search functionality, and probably some other things I'm forgetting. I really wish them the best, because as Shane said we need as many venues as possible to bring us liquidity. But in my view it isn't looking good, the changes they are making are only going to perpetuate (or even worsen) the downward spiral.

Amazing data work and software.
 
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Flippa bad services is not new, I have left them long tima ago!
 
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never used Flippa but didn't they start charging higher listing fees or something like that?
 
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Kevin Fink is still shown as Director of Domains on Flippa's about us page.
 
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Just wanted to make a few corrections to my post above. Apparently while the commission was increased from 10% to 15%, if you use Flippa escrow you only pay 12%. So still decent.

Also the day I made the post above their affiliate program actually credited me for a listing upgrade, Kevin said in January that they still hadn't fixed it but I guess they did since then. I wasn't credited for any in the three weeks since we switched back to their program and we used to sell a lot, so I assumed that was still true. But I guess now that they added back in two levels of premium listings they fixed it. Timing definitely seems odd, but probably a coincidence.

Kevin Fink is still shown as Director of Domains on Flippa's about us page.
He's definitely gone, I heard it from his own mouth and some woman took over his Flippa email address. They probably just forgot to update the page.
 
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"DSAD will be ending our relationship with Flippa as of today. It’s not because they aren’t advertising with us. That only ended the advertising relationship part. Its because I can’t get anyone to communicate..."

is that good news? please tag appropriately for those who are slow. me, for instance

what is DSAD? i forgot again... i'd been told but forgot
why dont people name themselves in a natural, human readable form...
is it required by ICANN to make up some idiotic 4L acronym just to pretend you are a huge professional domain investment something?
if you are a huge and professional something why not buy a good brandable name for that something.. instead of QVBZ.. or what that was again? BADS? whatever...

...btw is there any diff between the dsad shane and the other shane who was going to sue yet another guy i forgot his name but he also turned out to be a scammer or not i dont remember but one of them (shanes or the other guy) was definitely regarded to at that time as a web developer of the year in Texas or something like that, maybe Oklahoma who cares.. and the guy's name was Alan, or close to it, maybe Tobby... who sued whom i know not. but i've not followed closely, regrets. so who was the bad guy in the end? Tobby, Shane or dsad??
 
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is that good news? please tag appropriately for those who are slow. me, for instance

what is DSAD? i forgot again... i'd been told but forgot
why dont people name themselves in a natural, human readable form...
is it required by ICANN to make up some idiotic 4L acronym just to pretend you are a huge professional domain investment something?
if you are a huge and professional something why not buy a good brandable name for that something.. instead of QVBZ.. or what that was again? BADS? whatever...

...btw is there any diff between the dsad shane and the other shane who was going to sue yet another guy i forgot his name but he also turned out to be a scammer or not i dont remember but one of them (shanes or the other guy) was definitely regarded to at that time as a web developer of the year in Texas or something like that, maybe Oklahoma who cares.. and the guy's name was Alan, or close to it, maybe Tobby... who sued whom i know not. but i've not followed closely, regrets. so who was the bad guy in the end? Tobby, Shane or dsad??


I like it

as you have no fear
of posting your thoughts

cudos
 
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is that good news? please tag appropriately for those who are slow. me, for instance

what is DSAD? i forgot again... i'd been told but forgot
why dont people name themselves in a natural, human readable form...
is it required by ICANN to make up some idiotic 4L acronym just to pretend you are a huge professional domain investment something?
if you are a huge and professional something why not buy a good brandable name for that something.. instead of QVBZ.. or what that was again? BADS? whatever...

...btw is there any diff between the dsad shane and the other shane who was going to sue yet another guy i forgot his name but he also turned out to be a scammer or not i dont remember but one of them (shanes or the other guy) was definitely regarded to at that time as a web developer of the year in Texas or something like that, maybe Oklahoma who cares.. and the guy's name was Alan, or close to it, maybe Tobby... who sued whom i know not. but i've not followed closely, regrets. so who was the bad guy in the end? Tobby, Shane or dsad??
So, I don't know if it's good or bad news. Shane Cultra (formerly Domain Shane) publicly announced he and his website DSAD (stands for Domain Shane Accidental Domainer), got treated badly so both their advertising relationship and later their entire relationship ended.
 
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It's not all bad though. During the past two years they rolled out the portfolio functionality, got rid of unlimited free re-listings which served to reduce the noise significantly, created much better search functionality, and probably some other things I'm forgetting. I really wish them the best, because as Shane said we need as many venues as possible to bring us liquidity. But in my view it isn't looking good, the changes they are making are only going to perpetuate (or even worsen) the downward spiral.
The emboldened here were Kevin's ideas and nothing else. He was a terrific tool in the system and brought a lot to the table.
 
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is that good news? please tag appropriately for those who are slow. me, for instance

what is DSAD? i forgot again... i'd been told but forgot
why dont people name themselves in a natural, human readable form...
is it required by ICANN to make up some idiotic 4L acronym just to pretend you are a huge professional domain investment something?
if you are a huge and professional something why not buy a good brandable name for that something.. instead of QVBZ.. or what that was again? BADS? whatever...

...btw is there any diff between the dsad shane and the other shane who was going to sue yet another guy i forgot his name but he also turned out to be a scammer or not i dont remember but one of them (shanes or the other guy) was definitely regarded to at that time as a web developer of the year in Texas or something like that, maybe Oklahoma who cares.. and the guy's name was Alan, or close to it, maybe Tobby... who sued whom i know not. but i've not followed closely, regrets. so who was the bad guy in the end? Tobby, Shane or dsad??

THIS....
There are inside voices and outside voices. Some times its best to have thoughts that you keep inside and not type out. But since I don't expect everyone to know any history about me.

My name is Shane Cultra. From 2009 to 2014 I wrote a blog. Called it Domain Shane. Because my name is Shane. I buy and sell domains so and it rhymed. So I called it DomainShane. Memorable. Lets people know what I do. That's why you use a domain. It stuck. People began to know me as Domain Shane.

Met a guy named Aaron who wrote a blog called the Accidental Domainer. Turned out we grew up in the same town. Had family that knew each other. Both enjoyed endurance running and got to be friends. Decided that we each had blogs that were small but if we teamed up might become a better blog. Called the new entity Domain Shane and the Accidental Domainer. Combined but kept new site on Domain Shane because we were getting 50K visits a month

Met Josh or Ike or Hookbox and Travis when we were looking for writers and technical people to help assist in blog writing and upkeep and they became partners in site. I figured keeping the site named form myself was selfish and didn't represent all the great work the other were doing. So we took the acronym of the name and called it DSAD and moved the site to DSAD.com The rest is a story to be told
 
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The Flippa Domains trend definitely isn't positive, see the chart below. The green line is the total dollar volume they were doing per month, and the corresponding trendline shows a steep decline from more than $360k to around $180k. The red line is the number of sales they were closing per month at $100 and above, with a trendline showing a steep decline going from around 380 to right around 200.

But then you get to the blue line which is the number of sales per month below $100. You'll notice the trendline for that is almost perfectly flat. From this data it is clear that they're losing almost all of their dollar volume from higher-end sales. Basically they're becoming a place to burn trash more so than they've ever been.

Please note the graph excludes outlier sales of $50k+, of which there were 10 in 2015, 3 in 2016, and none so far in 2017. This would have made the green trendline have an even steeper negative slope. Also note that Kevin left Flippa in January, and since then we have not received any data on auctions that did not complete. This means there are more sales in our database for 2017 than there should be, which would have caused the blue and red trendlines to be even steeper negative.

flippa-trend.jpg


Not a pretty sight. I'm also told that they canceled their advertising on every single domain industry site, including ours as of March 1st, which means they aren't spending money driving visitors to your listings (except through their affiliate program). Don't get me started on the affiliate program either, when they got rid of premium and ultra-premium listing packages they broke the affiliate program and it stopped paying for listing upgrades (newsletter feature, home page feature, etc). They were made aware of the problem 14 months ago and still haven't fixed it, I don't believe they intend to either, even though their "partners" are getting screwed.

They acquired DomainHoldings which mostly just served to pump a bunch of overpriced, reserve inventory into the marketplace. Then they increased their commission by 50% from 10% to 15%. They gave Kevin the boot, a guy who was unarguably their best employee and the only one who paid any attention to us domainers.

It's not all bad though. During the past two years they rolled out the portfolio functionality, got rid of unlimited free re-listings which served to reduce the noise significantly, created much better search functionality, and probably some other things I'm forgetting. I really wish them the best, because as Shane said we need as many venues as possible to bring us liquidity. But in my view it isn't looking good, the changes they are making are only going to perpetuate (or even worsen) the downward spiral.


Mr. Sumner you have outdone yourself. Info that I expected but now proven. Amber Burke now runs the show and of course she reached out to me after my dis on my blog about lack of communication. She had to be told to write me after a fellow domainer CC'd us both. Otherwise she would have never reached out. From all I hear she is a great person and knows her stuff, but she's sitting in a sinking boat. Her email was basically sorry and if I can do anything to help let me know. I hate to see a good auction house go but its basically done and will be joining Bido as a former auction house of value. And not just because they stopped advertising with us. But because they stopped working with everyone in our industry and refused to invest in any form or marketing or promotion. Assumed people came on there own when in reality we sent thousands of buyers with direct links to auctions and other reminded buyers on a daily basis what names were up for sale. Maybe they thought they didn't need to promote but you can buy a lot of promotion for the $180K in sales they lost per month
 
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@Domain Shane

I agree with Flippa and the bullshit.

I have my own issues with them.

What's with the UniqueDesigns reference and zero bids?

It had multiple bids from day one and ended with 49 bids and an $x,xxx sale.

Just curious.
 
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@Domain Shane

I agree with Flippa and the bullsh*t.

I have my own issues with them.

What's with the UniqueDesigns reference and zero bids?

It had multiple bids from day one and ended with 49 bids and an $x,xxx sale.

Just curious.
NJ,

That was my mistake. I put it in the wrong column. It was supposed to be up top but didn't get moved. I make more mistakes than I should because I am up late working on the post :)

We recapped it and it was in the $1200 range
 
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any diff between the dsad shane and the other shane who was going to sue yet another guy i forgot his name but he also turned out to be a scammer or not i dont remember but one of them (shanes or the other guy) was definitely regarded to at that time as a web developer of the year in Texas or something like that, maybe Oklahoma who cares.. and the guy's name was Alan, or close to it, maybe Tobby... who sued whom i know not. but i've not followed closely, regrets. so who was the bad guy in the end? Tobby, Shane or dsad??
You took four distinct stories and mangled them all together to make a mucky cluster____. :xf.sick:

Follow along...

Shane Cultra is "dsad shane" is Domain Shane is good guy. Still with me?

Shane Bellone is "the other shane" is "turned out to be a scammer" is bad guy. How are we doing so far? Keep up.

Adam Dicker is "web developer of the year" is bad guy from Canada and is not "Alan" but is "close to it." Don't quit on me. We've made it this far.

Both Shane Bellone and Adam Dicker threatened to sue people but never did. Little boys with big words.

Toby Clements is bad guy and is not "Tobby" but is close to it. You made it! I'm proud of you.

You're welcome. :xf.grin:
 
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THIS....
There are inside voices and outside voices. Some times its best to have thoughts that you keep inside and not type out. But since I don't expect everyone to know any history about me.

My name is Shane Cultra. From 2009 to 2014 I wrote a blog. Called it Domain Shane. Because my name is Shane. I buy and sell domains so and it rhymed. So I called it DomainShane. Memorable. Lets people know what I do. That's why you use a domain. It stuck. People began to know me as Domain Shane.

Met a guy named Aaron who wrote a blog called the Accidental Domainer. Turned out we grew up in the same town. Had family that knew each other. Both enjoyed endurance running and got to be friends. Decided that we each had blogs that were small but if we teamed up might become a better blog. Called the new entity Domain Shane and the Accidental Domainer. Combined but kept new site on Domain Shane because we were getting 50K visits a month

Met Josh or Ike or Hookbox and Travis when we were looking for writers and technical people to help assist in blog writing and upkeep and they became partners in site. I figured keeping the site named form myself was selfish and didn't represent all the great work the other were doing. So we took the acronym of the name and called it DSAD and moved the site to DSAD.com The rest is a story to be told
Hey, there is only one Hookbox, and that's me! :)
 
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