@michaeljkrell
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I was very surprised by the numbers you used there and would appreciate if you explain them.
See the quote below according to which you claim that 50 sellers have done 17% or better, 50 sellers have done 10-17% range and 50 sellers have done 8-10%.
Now, did you include in this sellers that have, for example, 5 domains as well or you had certain cut-off? If you have included those, this is a clear data manipulation, as those numbers don't show how good the names were or how successful the top 150 are, it just shows a dumb luck and is not representative.
Let's say you have 200 sellers each of which have 5 similar quality names. Based on your sell through ratio for the whole platform and given that this names are average, total of 40 names would be sold among 200 sellers, and with good chance that 40 sellers would have 1 name sold, 160 - zero. Which should not be basis for you to boast that your top 40 sellers selling at 17%+ ratio.
Yes, we did ask for more data to which you have access, but please be so kind as to provide it free of manipulation and with underlying numbers.
Unless a seller has a statistically significant number of domains in his portfolio, his sell through numbers should not be part of this stat. Having at least 50 names would be a good starting point.
The next concern, you shared the top searched keywords, but stopped only at top 15, while you yourself have access to as many as you wish. Why not to share top 100 or even top 1000 instead of driving competition up for the top 15? Especially given that many of the top searches, if not all, are more like search of category rather than real keyword to be present in the brand (marketing, social, technology, software, real estate). You are not saying that the guy searching for "real estate" actually bought a name that contained "realestate" as part of it, something like "realestately"?
Concern number 3, you promote adding 4L without sharing important data. I have about 200 4Ls, but before I would consider adding any, I would need to know the average sellthrough for 4Ls specifically in last year, last quarter.
You mention listing at 5-20x of acquisiton cost at your marketplace as something good, while for most of regular brandables the listing is 50-100 times of acquisition cost. Unless the sell through % is compensating for it, there is no point in bringing in a liquid asset that gets offers regularly by itself or would sell at any marketplace easily without 30% commission plus other fees.
The Question of Sell-Through Rates
There has been a lot of talk about sell-through rates and comparing brandable marketplaces solely on this metric. While this can be a useful measure, it is important to take into consideration many other factors, such as the average sales price which we mentioned above. Could we sell considerably more names each month if we encouraged our sellers to accept low offers? You bet we could, but we don’t because this is a short-sighted decision that will only negatively affect sellers in the long run.
We feel that instead of comparing sell-through rates of an entire marketplace, it is more beneficial to view sell-through rates measured on an individual basis. When you have a marketplace with a small amount of very active sellers, that marketplace may very well have a higher sell-through rate than one with a large number of inactive sellers. In the case of BrandBucket, let's look at the 150 sellers with the best sell-through rates.
- The top 50 sellers have a sell-through rate of 17% or better
- The next 50 sellers have a sell-through rate of 10%-17%.
- The next 50 sellers have a sell-through rate of 8%-10%
*The sell-through rate is measured by taking the average number of names published in the past 12 months divided by the number sales in the past 12 months.
