Atom marketplace (formerly Squadhelp Marketplace)

JudgeMind · Jan 26, 2019

Hey Folks,

I've just started using squadhelp.com to list some of my brandable. So far I have 76 domains listed, there is no fee to list. I've had some decent action so far in the way of interested buyers but no sales as of yet. I've only been with them for 1 week now.

A bit of a summary review of SquadHelp:

PROS

No Listing fee
No Logo design fee
Ability to submit your names to end users holding naming contests
Ability to chat directly or send a message directly to end users.
Stats of your marketplace domains are shown in the marketplace dashboard.
Their customer service and support has been great, 24hr a day chat.
Ability to increase or decrease the list price of your domains or to show a discount. You can decrease or increase the price yourself by $200. If you want to lower more, you can contact support.
End users can shortlist your domains before they make a decision on which they want to purchase. The number of shortlists is shown in you marketplace dashboard.
When you submit your names you get to set the price you wish to get. Because their commissions are high I recommend listing at a higher price to offset the commission costs.
Their landing pages are fairly basic but they work. Because the marketplace is fairly new, I'm sure we will see style improvements in the future.
One thing I really like is they accept multiple extensions. I have listed .co and .io along with .com
Each seller gets a direct link to their marketplace portfolio, HERES MY PORTFOLIO. It is handy if your trying to p[promote your portfolio through social media.
I like that their marketplace doesn't have tens of thousands domain listings like BB. They are fairly strict on the domains they accept to list and so this helps keep the number of domains in the marketplace down and gets your listings more exposure.

CONS

Their commissions are very high, depending on the domain name they are usually between 30% and 35%. However, there are no listing fees, no logo design fees, so in the end their commission is very similar to brand buckets.
Their logos are not top quality, in fact I requested to have some of my logos remade.
I think they have a big backlog of logos to design, the wait time for logo design has been around 1 week, but your names are still listed while the logos are being designed.
After your names are accepted you need to agree to their commission rate, at this point you also need to apply your own keywords, descriptions etc. I found this was very time consuming.

golan · Apr 6, 2020

.h2o. said:
I am new to SquadHelp although obviously not new to domaining. Even though SH may not like "dirty laundry aired" I actually think my review is fair. I will get to the chase:

Squad Help Pros:

SH has the most traffic and best Alexa rank out of all the brandable marketplaces. This was my main reason in trying them first. Obviously, the logic is the more eyeballs on your names the higher chance of making more sales

SH appeals to real end users looking to brand their company, non-profit or hobby project by allowing people to suggest brand ideas in a Contest Format. (Other sites just give people the ability to search for keywords or categories without any real back and forth suggestion)

SH employs very talented logo designers that will give your domain a new life and attract viewers and ultimately buyers.

Ultimately, I had what started off as a first bad experience with SquadHelp but they ended up being nice to me in the end. Even though they rejected 96% of my names, I got a 96% refund.

For the 2 names they did accept (2 accepted 48 rejected), I was very pleased with the logos designed. Both logos were live within just 48 hours after domain approval.

Squad Help Warning: Seller Beware

I would like to send out a warning to all sellers new to SH because even though they were nice to me in the end, it may not be like this in the future. In other words, they may not offer refunds. After all, companies are a little more considerate now due to economic hardships related to the pandemic.

Also another fair warning, is you cannot predict what names they will accept based on the names they currently have on their marketplace. They have completely changed their criteria. And guess what? Their criteria is top secret.

This is the email I sent the SH customer service dept before getting my 96% refund. (emphasis done after the fact.)

Everyone should do their full research and diligence before spending money on any venture. Every $50 goes a long way. But sometimes, all the research, creativity, logic, and common sense will not help...

4/3 edit: I may change my review if SquadHelp publishes a general guide for sellers as to what kind of names are now accepted in their marketplace.

candy-shop and chocshop were full rightfully declined. Those both are not brandable names, they are too generic. No one builds brands on straight generic terms, you need a brand touch. I'm afraid you don't understand what branding is.

freety85 · Apr 6, 2020

it seems SH take TM's seriously (good thing), but this will guarantee that really good names never make the marketplace. Honestly, nowadays you barely find nice quality names registered with multiple extensions, but without single TM? They just rejected one of my name ( registered in 20+ extensions, many TM's in various countries, expert review 8 out 9 votes ( 88%). I am good however if they sell my $20 names for thousands though... - correction they reviewed and accepted the same - probably our valuation alter slightly on the name

h2o · Apr 6, 2020

golan said:
candy-shop and chocshop were full rightfully declined. Those both are not brandable names, they are too generic. No one builds brands on straight generic terms, you need a brand touch. I'm afraid you don't understand what branding is.

Hey there @golan. Actually, the more info everyone shares the better decisions each person can make. Your comments are beyond the point because SH does in fact accept generics. Out of the 2 domains they did accept for me one was a nice single word .net registered in the 90's. The other was straight up brandable. So out of my list 3 were generics and 47 were pure brandables. I mentioned the candy-shop and chocshop to make a point. Generics have more universal appeal. Brandables are more subjective as to what sounds good and looks good.

The 47 brandables I were all similar in quality to deliverninja.com which was reported here for selling on SH for 1699 if I remember correctly. Now SH has changed though.

Millionaire · Apr 6, 2020

My feedback to them on Expert Review system -

I'm not sure how Expert review system works but certainly it's not working in favour of both Sellers as well as Squadhelp. After adding this feature some names with high potential are being rejected without being manually reviewed by Squadhelp team.

I seriously didn't like this Expert Review system development. Another thing which makes me concerned is there so called experts are fellow domainers with 100s of names on Squadhelp. They might not want to list domains from another domainers & just take away the keywords for themselves. @GrantP Am I wrong?

brandsly · Apr 6, 2020

I don't usually like to get into these marketplace experience thread discussions, but really want to chip in a few things here after reading these comments.

It was obvious that the previous in-house review team were not all (if any) domainers themselves, they rejected names like o c k u.com (twice, even after review), l u x a s h o p which was later approved by BB for $7500, i z u k u . c o m, later approved by BB for $10k, some other examples c l e v e r p l e x . c o m, o l o z o. c o m, B o n u s f u l .com, B u z z L a y e r . c o m etc.....To be fair, I only submitted them because I don't love them myself, they are not the best in my portfolio, but think most brandable domainers can see instant value in these names. I sell similar names on the daily on Afternic and Dan for 4 figures.

When they decided to do this whole expert review thing, I was actually excited initially that they finally have real domainers reviewing names, but I don't think that is the case.

Some of them definitely are, I know some of the top sellers are long time brandable domainers. But the problem is SH started with a different business model, it started with contests where contestants mostly come up with handreggable names with no real liquid value of any kind, so anyone with a knack for coming up with good-sounding names joined and made money, but a lot of them never actually invested in domains and do not understand domain value. You can tell from a lot of their published and sold names on the site, some of these names would never ever be able to sell even for reg fee in auctions, let alone to end users without any marketplace exposure.

I mostly submitted my lower end names and made-up names I had for a while, then I learned about the lower commission for higher priced names, so I submitted one of my least favorite dictionary word s e t t l i n g .com, and guess what....it barely got a little over 50% vote through the expert review system, a name I fought hard in auction for and paid over $3k for!!! It was eventually reviewed in-house and got approved for $20K but still left a bad taste in my mouth. A bunch of aged names and good 5L names were also rejected, it's almost apparent that the upvotes were by real domainers and downvotes were by these so called "branders" that were not domain investors, and became branders only because of SH, and have no clue about domain value beyond the words they know. I've never been so proud of being able to call myself and the friends on NP "domainers".

This experience really made me thankful for deciding to not rely on these marketplaces to sell names and went out on my own from the start and learned to stand on my own feet and made mid-six figure sales every year. When I first started, I got a bunch of names rejected by Brandbucket too, doubted my names, dropped a bunch which later got picked up and got sold by other people, the ones I kept I made many many mid 4 figure sales. Now that I'm more experienced, I don't let these marketplace valuations get to me and doubt my names anymore, but it's still frustrating at times. They really only deserve your lowest quality and handregged names.

I still managed to get over 30% approval rate, but the voting system is very flawed. "Experts" pick their favorite out of 4 names in every poll, but what if all 4 names belong to the same person and they are all good names?! Also basically it depends on your luck, if everyone else's names suck on the day you submit, you get more approvals, if someone submit a bunch of super premium names at once, you are screwed. If there's no names queued up, and I submit a thousand names at once, even if they are all good names, they still will not all get approved because only the ones relatively better than other ones will get approved. Or am I missing something here? @GrantP

GrantP · Apr 6, 2020

I would like to address some of the comments related to Trademark checks, and Expert Reviews.

Trademark Checks

The comprehensive Trademark checks that were referred in some of the previous threads are offered to our buyers if they request a Trademark research. These Trademark reports are prepared by a Licensed Trademark attorney. We do not perform a thorough Trademark analysis at the time of accepting or rejecting a Marketplace domain. This is because Trademarks are based on a class, and jurisdiction (e.g. USA, Australia etc). Many of our Marketplace domains are relevant for many industries, so even if there is a conflict in one specific class, it does not automatically mean that the domain can not be used in a different industry or a different country. Therefore, we leave this level of due diligence up to the buyer, and we do offer assistance in performing this due diligence if the buyers request it.

Expert Reviews

We switched to this process because we believe that the collective opinion of multiple experts is much more reliable than the opinion of one person from the internal review team. The experts who review the domains bring a significant domaining experience (based upon their overall domain portfolio and/or sales record). The way this process is setup, each reviewer is randomly shown a list of 4 domains at a time from a pool of several hundred names, and they can vote for their best choice (or they can mark all of them as "not favorite" by skipping the poll). The process is not expected to generate 100% score for most domains. In fact our thresholds for approving domains are much lower than the 100% score.This is because:

a) Brandable domains are subjective: Different experts can have a different opinion about names.
b) It is possible that there may be more than one good names in a specific poll.

This is why, we are now running most domains through 15-20 polls, and each poll is fully randomized. What we are seeing however is that in almost all cases, the names that are being approved based on this process represent some of the best names submitted to our Marketplace. As with most polling/voting based platforms, such as Quora and Reddit, good content bubbles up to the top, and we are seeing the exact same outcome with this process.

The names that do no receive conclusive results from the polls, or the names above a certain price point are manually reviewed by our team for final approval.

For example, if 10 experts looked at a domain in 10 randomized polls, and the name received 0 votes, it is likely the domain will be automatically rejected. You have the option to request another review if you believe that someone from internal team should take another look at the rejected domain. On the other hand, if the name received 4 or more likes in 10 polls, it will likely be accepted. However if the name receives a 30% score for example, it will likely be reviewed by our internal team for final approval. For any domains that are being approved or rejected via this process, our internal team is closely monitoring the number of votes, and adjusting our algorithm accordingly. We are also looking closely into cases where the decision of our internal team would have been different from the decision by our algorithm - these insights will help us improve further.

This is a new process, it is not perfect but we believe it is already working significantly better than the previous internal review process. We will continue to make additional improvements based upon our ongoing learnings.

We want to manage the growth of Marketplace in a very controlled fashion, and while this process may lead to a reduction in our overall acceptance rate, we truly believe that this is significantly more effective and reliable in curating the best names for the Marketplace.

Yusupbabay · Apr 7, 2020

brandsly said:
I don't usually like to get into these marketplace experience thread discussions, but really want to chip in a few things here after reading these comments.

It was obvious that the previous in-house review team were not all (if any) domainers themselves, they rejected names like o c k u.com (twice, even after review), l u x a s h o p which was later approved by BB for $7500, i z u k u . c o m, later approved by BB for $10k, some other examples c l e v e r p l e x . c o m, o l o z o. c o m, B o n u s f u l .com, B u z z L a y e r . c o m etc.....To be fair, I only submitted them because I don't love them myself, they are not the best in my portfolio, but think most brandable domainers can see instant value in these names. I sell similar names on the daily on Afternic and Dan for 4 figures.

When they decided to do this whole expert review thing, I was actually excited initially that they finally have real domainers reviewing names, but I don't think that is the case.

Some of them definitely are, I know some of the top sellers are long time brandable domainers. But the problem is SH started with a different business model, it started with contests where contestants mostly come up with handreggable names with no real liquid value of any kind, so anyone with a knack for coming up with good-sounding names joined and made money, but a lot of them never actually invested in domains and do not understand domain value. You can tell from a lot of their published and sold names on the site, some of these names would never ever be able to sell even for reg fee in auctions, let alone to end users without any marketplace exposure.

I mostly submitted my lower end names and made-up names I had for a while, then I learned about the lower commission for higher priced names, so I submitted one of my least favorite dictionary word s e t t l i n g .com, and guess what....it barely got a little over 50% vote through the expert review system, a name I fought hard in auction for and paid over $3k for!!! It was eventually reviewed in-house and got approved for $20K but still left a bad taste in my mouth. A bunch of aged names and good 5L names were also rejected, it's almost apparent that the upvotes were by real domainers and downvotes were by these so called "branders" that were not domain investors, and became branders only because of SH, and have no clue about domain value beyond the words they know. I've never been so proud of being able to call myself and the friends on NP "domainers".

This experience really made me thankful for deciding to not rely on these marketplaces to sell names and went out on my own from the start and learned to stand on my own feet and made mid-six figure sales every year. When I first started, I got a bunch of names rejected by Brandbucket too, doubted my names, dropped a bunch which later got picked up and got sold by other people, the ones I kept I made many many mid 4 figure sales. Now that I'm more experienced, I don't let these marketplace valuations get to me and doubt my names anymore, but it's still frustrating at times. They really only deserve your lowest quality and handregged names.

I still managed to get over 30% approval rate, but the voting system is very flawed. "Experts" pick their favorite out of 4 names in every poll, but what if all 4 names belong to the same person and they are all good names?! Also basically it depends on your luck, if everyone else's names suck on the day you submit, you get more approvals, if someone submit a bunch of super premium names at once, you are screwed. If there's no names queued up, and I submit a thousand names at once, even if they are all good names, they still will not all get approved because only the ones relatively better than other ones will get approved. Or am I missing something here? @GrantP

In my opinion, the current SquadHelp "Expert Reviews" system is better than 2019.

- in 2020 the level of domain acceptance that I submitted increased by 20 percent

- in 2019 I submitted my 5 best domains and was rejected by SquadHelp :

Ticket.org
Lipstik.com
Alegna.com
Masak.com
PayLater.net

SuperBrander · Apr 7, 2020

I think Squadhelp's new process is a good direction because: 1. It speeds up the reviewing process considerably. 2. It uses curated wisdom to determine likelihood of a sale, instead of one person making the call.

Squadhelp entered the domaining world by storm. These guys know tons about branding, but dealing with aftermarket domains based on external sales data and other metrics is a different animal. To give you an idea, in the past year SH rejected 3 highly brandable domains that I sold later for low to mid $XX,XXX each elsewhere. That was likely a result of one person looking at them without being aware of some of the data that makes them more likely to sell. I think that recognizing that using crowd wisdom by people who have more experience in domaining is a smart move. Nothing will ever be perfect, but it's an improvement.

I participated as an expert reviewer for the first few days of the beta phase and then cleared my space for someone else. Were my decisions always the best? I can say that I mostly went through what I perceived of as a lot of crap and tried to choose names with potential. There were a few obvious gems and some names that weren't a slam dunk but had some potential, IMO. On a few occassions I kicked myself a second after choosing something that I shouldn't have or not choosing something I should have due to a brain fart, but I think I can say that in 99% of the cases- I made good decisions based on what I thought was best and a good fit based on names that sell at SH. Comparable sales are an indication that can't be ignored, especially if they're specific to a certain marketplace. We may not always understand them or love the names- but these trends need to be factored in. Most of the domains I voted for were approved. I never avoided from choosing a domain because it "rivaled" one of mine. I didn't even think about my domains while making selections. The randomness of the listings you're presented with, the crowd aspect of it and SH's supervision should help prevent such issues in case someone does make such choices.

The reality is everybody usually think that their domains are great or at least acceptable grade but sometimes there are better options or a specific domain is too niche or not in an ideal extension etc. I get tons of rejections too and hell, I also submit some names that aren't the best because sometimes they sell too. Things can get subjective with some brandables and one man's trash can sometimes be another man's treasure. I often scratch my head at some of the sales. The good news is that there's a Review option people can use and there are other marketplaces to try submitting to.

On a final note- keep in mind that oversaturating SH isn't something that's beneficial to sellers (or potential buyers for that matter) as that means less visibility for other domains, which in some cases could get totally buried especially if they don't contain a keyword or a popular keyword. So a high rejection rate also works in your favor for your already accepted domains.

Footprint789 · Apr 7, 2020

Surender Singh said:
My feedback to them on Expert Review system -

I'm not sure how Expert review system works but certainly it's not working in favour of both Sellers as well as Squadhelp. After adding this feature some names with high potential are being rejected without being manually reviewed by Squadhelp team.

I seriously didn't like this Expert Review system development. Another thing which makes me concerned is there so called experts are fellow domainers with 100s of names on Squadhelp. They might not want to list domains from another domainers & just take away the keywords for themselves. @GrantP Am I wrong?

I do share few of the concerns that's been mentioned here. I was thinking of this recently after my initial experience submitting via this new method.

My feedback on this Expert Review process
1. Expert review. score - I see a few issues with the current way of voting. I think there should be something like an upvote/downvote for "each name" and aggregrate score of upvotes can be used to decide a name's potential.

In the current system, Experts could very well keep skipping decent names too and chose "none of the names above" inorder to wait for & in the hopes of finding and favoriting an excellent name.

As the past SH sales clearly indicates, not all names that are being sold are excellent, even average names and decent names are getting sold. This is because what is Excellent name for an expert reviewer might look like an average name for prospective buyers and vice versa as is evident by the name sales.

Hence, I suggest upvote/downvote for each name that experts should vote on to get the aggregrate score instead of letting them skip any names of their choice.

2. Conflict of Interest - After thinking about the process, I see there's a clear conflict of interest possibility. It might be in the interest of (some) Expert reviewers to reject/skip names which they feel are decent and can compete with their own names in their industry. And as the criteria for an Expert reviewer is 100s of brandable names, they "all" probably have names in all industries. As more similar or better names can make it tough for their own names to sell or at the least delay their sale, this could play a part in rejection.

Although I don't think every expert does it and I don't want to generalize but it's human psychology that might play on someone's mind consciously or subconsciously. Conflict of interest is a very common issue that is addressed every where. So, how is this being addressed at SH?

I get a feeling that this particular feature in it's current form might be favorable towards Large portfolio Creatives and works against Small portfolio & upcoming creatives.

Having said that, I gave a "like" react when the feature was announced. This is still a great idea but not without a few issues. I firmly believe that SH is doing great things to improve marketplace and will continue to do so. Hope these concerns are addressed and taken as constructive feedback.

Thanks

Millionaire · Apr 7, 2020

Footprint789 said:
I do share few of the concerns that's been mentioned here. I was thinking of this recently after my initial experience submitting via this new method.

My feedback on this Expert Review process
1. Expert review. score - I see a few issues with the current way of voting. I think there should be something like an upvote/downvote for "each name" and aggregrate score of upvotes can be used to decide a name's potential.

In the current system, Experts could very well keep skipping decent names too and chose "none of the names above" inorder to wait for & in the hopes of finding and favoriting an excellent name.

As the past SH sales clearly indicates, not all names that are being sold are excellent, even average names and decent names are getting sold. This is because what is Excellent name for an expert reviewer might look like an average name for prospective buyers and vice versa as is evident by the name sales.

Hence, I suggest upvote/downvote for each name that experts should vote on to get the aggregrate score instead of letting them skip any names of their choice.

2. Conflict of Interest - After thinking about the process, I see there's a clear conflict of interest possibility. It might be in the interest of (some) Expert reviewers to reject/skip names which they feel are decent and can compete with their own names in their industry. And as the criteria for an Expert reviewer is 100s of brandable names, they "all" probably have names in all industries. As more similar or better names can make it tough for their own names to sell or at the least delay their sale, this could play a part in rejection.

Although I don't think every expert does it and I don't want to generalize but it's human psychology that might play on someone's mind consciously or subconsciously. Conflict of interest is a very common issue that is addressed every where. So, how is this being addressed at SH?

I get a feeling that this particular feature in it's current form might be favorable towards Large portfolio Creatives and works against Small portfolio & upcoming creatives.

Being said that, I gave a "like" react when the feature was announced. This is still a great idea but not without a few issues. I firmly believe that SH is doing great things to improve marketplace and will continue to do so. Hope these concerns are addressed and taken as constructive feedback.

Thanks

Absolutely...you described my concern with appropriate words. Thanks!

NameMedia · Apr 7, 2020

I have been with Squadhelp for a while. It's a great platform. Above anything else, the customer service has been fantastic. The staff are always helpful, responsive and great to deal with.
I've been happy and impressed with Squadhelp's ability to add new features and bring positive changes and opportunities to sellers. In that, all great.

Sales, however, have been slower than I would like. I have a decent number of names with them now, and I am not seeing sales rates near their averages. I understand sales rates go up and down. But I am quite a way off even average sales rates currently. Hope that improves soon.

GrantP · Apr 7, 2020

Conflict of interest is a valid concern when someone else is reviewing your domains, however there are several checks in this process to avoid that scenario.

1) The incentives offered by this program are based on experts making the right decisions. For example, the cash rewards as well as other rewards are only offered if the expert votes on a name that is actually accepted into the Marketplace, and when that name sells.

2) For each expert, we keep track of specific approval metrics (e.g. Hit Rate). In other words, we keep track of which domains were voted as favorites by a specific expert, and how many of them ended up getting rejected instead due to other majority votes. Similarly which domains were not voted as favorites, and how many of them ended up getting approved instead. If an expert is knowingly making wrong choices (e.g. downvoting good names and upvoting bad names), their hit rate will drop significantly and we are closely monitoring that metric. In-fact, if a hit rate drops below a certain point, our system stops assigning new polls to the expert.

We plan to offer additional incentives for experts who are able to maintain the highest hit rate.

The system is designed in a way that if certain individuals are consistently making decisions that are different from the majority, they will be easily flagged. Since there are more than dozen experts reviewing each name separately, the majority vote always appears to be overwhelmingly accurate.

A name is automatically rejected by this process only if almost all experts downvoted that name. Even if a name receives 25-30% upvotes, it is manually reviewed by our team for approval or rejection. Having said that, if you see any instances where you believe your name should have been accepted but was instead rejected, please use the Request review feature so we can take another look at it.

We will continue to monitor this closely and make necessary adjustments as needed to ensure we are selecting the best domains that have the greatest potential of sale.

h2o · Apr 7, 2020

NameMedia said:
Sales, however, have been slower than I would like. I have a decent number of names with them now, and I am not seeing sales rates near their averages. I understand sales rates go up and down. But I am quite a way off even average sales rates currently. Hope that improves soon.

Hey @NameMedia Thanks for your input. I am curious what you know about the SH sales averages/Sales Rate that you refer to.

Yusupbabay · Apr 8, 2020

GrantP said:
I would like to address some of the comments related to Trademark checks, and Expert Reviews.

Trademark Checks

The comprehensive Trademark checks that were referred in some of the previous threads are offered to our buyers if they request a Trademark research. These Trademark reports are prepared by a Licensed Trademark attorney. We do not perform a thorough Trademark analysis at the time of accepting or rejecting a Marketplace domain. This is because Trademarks are based on a class, and jurisdiction (e.g. USA, Australia etc). Many of our Marketplace domains are relevant for many industries, so even if there is a conflict in one specific class, it does not automatically mean that the domain can not be used in a different industry or a different country. Therefore, we leave this level of due diligence up to the buyer, and we do offer assistance in performing this due diligence if the buyers request it.

Expert Reviews

We switched to this process because we believe that the collective opinion of multiple experts is much more reliable than the opinion of one person from the internal review team. The experts who review the domains bring a significant domaining experience (based upon their overall domain portfolio and/or sales record). The way this process is setup, each reviewer is randomly shown a list of 4 domains at a time from a pool of several hundred names, and they can vote for their best choice (or they can mark all of them as "not favorite" by skipping the poll). The process is not expected to generate 100% score for most domains. In fact our thresholds for approving domains are much lower than the 100% score.This is because:

a) Brandable domains are subjective: Different experts can have a different opinion about names.
b) It is possible that there may be more than one good names in a specific poll.

This is why, we are now running most domains through 15-20 polls, and each poll is fully randomized. What we are seeing however is that in almost all cases, the names that are being approved based on this process represent some of the best names submitted to our Marketplace. As with most polling/voting based platforms, such as Quora and Reddit, good content bubbles up to the top, and we are seeing the exact same outcome with this process.

The names that do no receive conclusive results from the polls, or the names above a certain price point are manually reviewed by our team for final approval.

For example, if 10 experts looked at a domain in 10 randomized polls, and the name received 0 votes, it is likely the domain will be automatically rejected. You have the option to request another review if you believe that someone from internal team should take another look at the rejected domain. On the other hand, if the name received 4 or more likes in 10 polls, it will likely be accepted. However if the name receives a 30% score for example, it will likely be reviewed by our internal team for final approval. For any domains that are being approved or rejected via this process, our internal team is closely monitoring the number of votes, and adjusting our algorithm accordingly. We are also looking closely into cases where the decision of our internal team would have been different from the decision by our algorithm - these insights will help us improve further.

This is a new process, it is not perfect but we believe it is already working significantly better than the previous internal review process. We will continue to make additional improvements based upon our ongoing learnings.

We want to manage the growth of Marketplace in a very controlled fashion, and while this process may lead to a reduction in our overall acceptance rate, we truly believe that this is significantly more effective and reliable in curating the best names for the Marketplace.

Hi @GrantP
"Expert Reviews" is an extraordinary innovation, but there are still some shortcomings, namely a conflict of interest.
so my suggestion should be to use the appraisal from Godaddy.com, because this appraisal is the most widely used by domain investors.

my experience today, one of my best domains CryptoVendor.com was rejected because of the expert SH's assessment: "Expert Review Score: 4/18 Votes (22%)"

with the following data :

Appraisal Godaddy.com

Not approved by SH

ecomslice · Apr 8, 2020

In all fairness, all language is limited. And all domains subjective. There is no science. And its submit or not. Deal with it or stop like I have.

But. To withhold acceptance data, vrs sales data on a weekly basis for such a " transparent " company. Well. ...

Any company creating growth at the financial expense of their team during a economical slow down. Should be shamed.

NameMedia · Apr 8, 2020

.h2o. said:
Hey @NameMedia Thanks for your input. I am curious what you know about the SH sales averages/Sales Rate that you refer to.

Thanks. Just the same as any user of the site, I'm afraid. No special information.

Bram · Apr 8, 2020

Yusupbabay said:
my experience today, one of my best domains CryptoVendor.com was rejected because of the expert SH's assessment: "Expert Review Score: 4/18 Votes (22%)"

Really interesting score, it's obviously a good domain name.

Footprint789 · Apr 8, 2020

GrantP said:
Conflict of interest is a valid concern when someone else is reviewing your domains, however there are several checks in this process to avoid that scenario.

1) The incentives offered by this program are based on experts making the right decisions. For example, the cash rewards as well as other rewards are only offered if the expert votes on a name that is actually accepted into the Marketplace, and when that name sells.

2) For each expert, we keep track of specific approval metrics (e.g. Hit Rate). In other words, we keep track of which domains were voted as favorites by a specific expert, and how many of them ended up getting rejected instead due to other majority votes. Similarly which domains were not voted as favorites, and how many of them ended up getting approved instead. If an expert is knowingly making wrong choices (e.g. downvoting good names and upvoting bad names), their hit rate will drop significantly and we are closely monitoring that metric. In-fact, if a hit rate drops below a certain point, our system stops assigning new polls to the expert.

We plan to offer additional incentives for experts who are able to maintain the highest hit rate.

The system is designed in a way that if certain individuals are consistently making decisions that are different from the majority, they will be easily flagged. Since there are more than dozen experts reviewing each name separately, the majority vote always appears to be overwhelmingly accurate.

A name is automatically rejected by this process only if almost all experts downvoted that name. Even if a name receives 25-30% upvotes, it is manually reviewed by our team for approval or rejection. Having said that, if you see any instances where you believe your name should have been accepted but was instead rejected, please use the Request review feature so we can take another look at it.

We will continue to monitor this closely and make necessary adjustments as needed to ensure we are selecting the best domains that have the greatest potential of sale.

Thanks Grant for addressing few concerns, I appreciate the steps that are being taken and providing information to all the concerned creatives/domainers

I would like to add few points to this
1. Cash rewards are great and all but "if " someone has an intention to play unfair, I don't think cash rewards are going to stop them as the reward of having less competition to their names and getting quick or more sales which would generally be in thousands of dollars is far far more than the cash rewards they would get by playing fair. So, Cash rewards are irrelevant for these specific people.

What I would suggest is to have a deterrent so that they feel they are taking huge risk by indulging in those ways.
If there is a "conclusive" evidence (taking into account, metrics that you mentioned) that they are intentionally down voting names what they feel as competition,

SH should mention that "they are monitoring their review activity and if found could lead to account action & restrictions where they won't be allowed to submit new names anymore" or something similar. This is a great gamble for experts with 100s of brandable names that I think will keep them away from such practices, if any.
SH should make it clear by communicating this to all experts and mention this in the expert review article page as well so as to give assurance to all other creatives(especially small & medium creatives).

2. Finding the odd one is possible when every expert is playing fair and only one is not. For this to happen, the requirement should be that all experts are not influenced in any way by other experts and should be completely unknown of the information that who else is an expert apart from themselves.

For this, I request that SH mentions that "mentioning, sharing or posting information that he/she or someone is an Expert should be strictly disallowed and could likely lead to account action". For eg: If I casually mention in NP chat that I am an expert reviewer(I am not), other Expert reviewers can DM me or connect with me potentially creating a scope for influencing one another's decisions. Or for that matter even non-expert reviewers should not know who are the expert reviewers as this could create a chance for lobbying. So this information should be strictly confidential.

3. I request/suggest that above two clear points to be communicated to experts and mentioned in the SH expert review page for all other creatives/domainers to see, which can be comforting to them and removes their concerns to some extent every time their name that they perceive as "good" gets rejected and will even reduce SH workload to a little extent by reducing customer support escalations on this.

I believe mostly every expert to be fair and professional but then again it's better to be safe and have necessary guidelines in place as it's been followed in many industries eg: (stock market listings guidelines for promoters )rather than leaving it to someone's choice.

Hope these points are given a thought.

Thanks.

ALDaisy1 · Apr 8, 2020

I would be really surprised if any expert reviewer wanted people to know they held that position. The posts in this thread make it clear any decision they make is going to be met with criticism, so staying anonymous is probably best for everyone involved.

Veneris · Apr 8, 2020

Two questions please, does these Expert Reviewers vote on their own names??

Secondly, what made you think they're experts

cause four of my names have been rejected respectively in the last few days. And sincerely i feel those names are keyword quality.

gina ferrano · Apr 9, 2020

I joined SH in December of 2018, entered a few contests, though they had just started selling in the marketplace, they were nothing like they are today. (I dropped out of domaining for 2 years) Now back from hibernation I decided to buy more names and amp up sales. The landscape has a changed quite a bit! I've been a BB seller since 2014, though I also worked for Namerific for two years as a copywriter, and sampled BR & BP but I've had my best luck with BB. But, I decided to give the marketplace on SH a fair shake, and wondered what most folks do or their experiences, good and bad with all the different tiers: basic, +, premium and submitting unregistered names versus ones we own, as there seems to be far more options as far as how one submits than on other platforms. Thanks in advance!

bobo4us · Apr 10, 2020

Many of who submitted names far before introduction of expert review are the lucky ones. If you have built your portfolios 2 years back to more than 100 on SH, and are now termed as expert, you are likely the luckiest one here. Reason is that i believe that many names that have been submitted and approved long time ago will never find ways to get approved these days using the expert review method now. i dont know what catartea used to gather names to poll, but if it is based on random selection, it is flawed. Many names might be very good and still rejected because you just need to select and go as expert reviewer. And i dont want to believe that some SH experts monitor the reason why some good names are rejected. The submission time and review time happens under few hours with multiple things to do at that time, i may be wrong but thats what i believe likely happen. The only alternative which is request review, which is not as fast as normal premium submission. Time will tell.
May be after 3 years when majority of names that are not sold are dropped, then everything can come back to factory reset. but as at now, there will always be conflicts of interest in many dimensions.

massive1019 · Apr 10, 2020

bobo4us said:
Many of who submitted names far before introduction of expert review are the lucky ones. If you have built your portfolios 2 years back to more than 100 on SH, and are now termed as expert, you are likely the luckiest one here. Reason is that i believe that many names that have been submitted and approved long time ago will never find ways to get approved these days using the expert review method now. i dont know what catartea used to gather names to poll, but if it is based on random selection, it is flawed. Many names might be very good and still rejected because you just need to select and go as expert reviewer. And i dont want to believe that some SH experts monitor the reason why some good names are rejected. The submission time and review time happens under few hours with multiple things to do at that time, i may be wrong but thats what i believe likely happen. The only alternative which is request review, which is not as fast as normal premium submission. Time will tell.
May be after 3 years when majority of names that are not sold are dropped, then everything can come back to factory reset. but as at now, there will always be conflicts of interest in many dimensions.

I quite agree with you...because I don't see any reason behind rejecting

FoodyMom//com and GlowAge//com

NameWell · Apr 10, 2020

KDN said:
My Cliqly.com sale is in danger of getting cancelled after 3 months. The only logical reason I can think of right now is the corona virus.

I had some canceled sales (domains purchased with installments) before corona.

bobo4us said:
Many of who submitted names far before introduction of expert review are the lucky ones. If you have built your portfolios 2 years back to more than 100 on SH, and are now termed as expert, you are likely the luckiest one here. Reason is that i believe that many names that have been submitted and approved long time ago will never find ways to get approved these days using the expert review method now. i dont know what catartea used to gather names to poll, but if it is based on random selection, it is flawed. Many names might be very good and still rejected because you just need to select and go as expert reviewer. And i dont want to believe that some SH experts monitor the reason why some good names are rejected. The submission time and review time happens under few hours with multiple things to do at that time, i may be wrong but thats what i believe likely happen. The only alternative which is request review, which is not as fast as normal premium submission. Time will tell.
May be after 3 years when majority of names that are not sold are dropped, then everything can come back to factory reset. but as at now, there will always be conflicts of interest in many dimensions.

It's not about whether reviews are done only by employees of SH or by experts + employees (now, even though experts are also reviewing domain names, employees most often are still the ones who make the final decision). It's all about saturation and trends.

Two - three years ago when SH marketplace was new, they needed all kinds of names in many different categories. Also, they were open for experimentation (some names were approved as an experiment in order to see how the audience will react to them). But if you think it was super easy getting your names accepted back them I can tell you that it wasn't. I was there since the very beginning of the marketplace. It was never easy to get your names accepted.

Now the marketplace is saturated. There are a lot of names in all categories. And since SH was closely monitoring the activity of the marketplace, now they have vast statistical data of what their buyers like.
If there are already 50 great names with a strong keyword X, there's just simply no point in accepting 50 more very similar ones and especially if the popularity of that keyword (or style or category) is slowly decreasing among potential buyers. Some styles of names are more popular than others. Some business fields are more popular than others. There are trends and they change over the time. Experts make decisions based on their personal knowledge and experience. Then SH employees make decisions based on vast statistical data and current trends that they see. If your domain is able to jump through both of those hoops it will likely be accepted. If not, then not (even if it's a great domain name). And that's a good thing.

Ostrados · Apr 10, 2020

@GrantP
Pick 1 out of 4 is not good method because good names can be missed.

I suggest to rate domains individually by using upvote/downvote, or rate from 1 to 5 for each domain. This way there will be more gray rates not just black & white. You can then expirement with the threshold score at whic names will be accepted, you can decrease it to allow higher approval rate or increase it to reduce it.

Atom marketplace (formerly Squadhelp Marketplace)

BrandAim.comTop Member

GolanMedia.comTop Member

Established Member

Established Member

Top Member

Established Member

Squadhelp.comUpgraded Member

presiden.comTop Member

Top Member

Established Member

Top Member

Established Member

Squadhelp.comUpgraded Member

Established Member

presiden.comTop Member

Top Member

Established Member

Established Member

Established Member

Established Member

Established Member

Established Member

Established Member

Established Member

Established Member

EpicName.comTop Member

Similar threads

We're social

Pinned

Appreciation

Agreement