I stopped adding domains to my BrandBucket portfolio months ago (and recently sold off part of my BB portfolio here at NP). Not because of disappointing results (my dashboard indicates a sell through of 6.22% and average sales price of $3,047 for the past 12 months, top 3% of sellers), but because I'm disappointed by the unreliability and unpredictability of their management team.
I invested a lot of time and money into building up my BrandBucket portfolio and followed all of their rules. Then suddenly they decided to give every seller a character score, penalizing actions they never warned against before implementing this "new" set of rules. So even though I never broke any explicitly stated rules at BB, I suddenly had a restricted account in bad standing (in my case, mainly because I removed accepted names that I felt were underpriced by BB, and BB were not wiling to increase suggested prices, so I never proceeded to list them - something they never had any problem with prior to instituting their seller score system). I’ve contacted BB about this, and they have reiterated that my account should be in bad standing, as per their parameters for judging this. I know there are many sellers who never broke any of BrandBucket's rules, who now have accounts in bad standing, because they did something that BB later decided was not okay (retroactively changing the consequences of something they never had any problems with initially...).
A lot of sellers, including myself, spent a lot of time and money on building up a BB portfolio, finding domains to list at BrandBucket, paying $10 listing fee’s, industry-high 30% commission on sales + $100-$500 logo fee’s, and paypal payout fee’s after that, all while following their rules. But despite all the $ I and other regular sellers sent to BB, they suddenly decided to put a lot of good sellers accounts into bad standing, in an attempt to fix many of their own unwise decisions, such as permitting the BB reseller market, and the negative consequences that brought about. Yet, their actions to remedy all the structural bias favoring their inner circle have been minimal in comparison (and they have not done anything to "penalize" past misuses of the system by management). This clearly revealed their priorities, along with their willingness to throw their rule-abiding, listing-fee-paying sellers under the bus in an attempt to fix their own bad business decisions, while fully protecting their own interests, rather than properly owing up to their own mistakes, and treating their sellers (who are also their paying customers) fairly. Seeing this unfold has been really disappointing as a seller. As a result of these developments, I don't see BrandBucket as a dependable partner for the future, that will look out of my interests as a seller (or even treat me fairly), but will instead keep pursuing what is best for themselves, even if at times it is directly at odds with the interest of their regular sellers (who are paying customers who helped build up their business, and who make up the majority of their inventory).
I hope everyone who is still building up their BB portfolio will see great results from their investment, but also advice against focusing your entire domaining strategy towards only building up a BB portfolio. Marketplace-wide sales/results at BB are in large part subject to the decisions of their management team, and there is a lot of uncertainty surrounding where the platform is headed, how they might arrange their search algorithm (as the heated, now deleted, discussion about that in this thread showed), what kinds of rules or restrictions might suddenly be imposed on sellers, etc. One year ago, I never would have expected BB to deem my account in “bad standing” today, and one year ago, I would never have expected BB to have 40,000 or 50,000 names today (it appears they no longer display this number?). Similarly, I have no idea where they will be one year from now, in early 2018, so it's hard to make sound long term domain investing plans amidst so much uncertainty, and for that reason I am now focusing on the more stable and predicable model of just selling names through the good old free-to-list marketplaces (e.g. Afternic) instead.
