opinion BrandBucket is doing it on purpose?

[bazabizo]

I think they are deliberately delaying the review of domains at the moment. I have domains close to 6 domains without being reviewed. The window is increasing over time, opposite to what they claimed earlier that they will shorten this period to 1 week, its actually increasing since then.

But why?

I think its on purpose, they have now 8,500 domains in the marketplace and the % of those getting sold is already decreasing. I believe they wont sell more domains if they got 20K domains vs 8K. On the contrary, lots of domainers will refrain from listing there due the crowded marketplace. I think they are inherently telling us that they want to slow down. Although, If thats the case, I would have expected them to tell us openly that they are not accepting anymore in the time being! or at least accepting a certain number of domains only.

I have 75 domains on BB and around 80 pending review. I look at a brandable marketplace with such a review, logo design, editor and 30% comm., at something where I can easily expect 5-7% of my listed portfolio to sell. I dont have ANY hand registered domains there, and any of these domains, anyone here would ALWAYS backorder them. Its becoming a waste of time rather than a supporter to sell!

I do love their platform and cant deny its leadership in this domain, no matter what others will do. They got the connections, decent sales team and responsive customer support. However, I would expect them to be more open with us (sellers) than whats the case right now.

KINDLY, this thread is only to discuss the above topic, and NOT TO compare BB with any other brandable marketplace. So, please lets stick to it

Thanks for reading until here.

 

[Maxwell]

I can't blame them for wanting to slow down, though they should tell us.

 

[bazabizo]

Exactly thats what Im saying!

 

[Mr.Natwarlal]

Yes I agree.. my 10 domains pending from almost 1 month..

 

[hookbox]

The last time Michael Krell posted his sales from Brand Bucket was on December 17. He was posting sales every week and nothing for the past month. He now has 880 names listed. I had said before that the only reason he was making so many sales is because his names were the bulk of the names being listed at the time. At that time he had around 850 names. So since he has only added 30 names in the past two months his sales have dropped because that small amount of names gets lost in the sea of 8500 names now.

Also having so many names the buyer gets frustrated having to go through 164 pages of mediocre names. Brand Bucket can say all they want that the majority of their sales happen because the buyer will choose a category like health and then find a name they like in that category but thats not true. There are so many 5,6,7 letter Mashup style names that would work but the buyer ends up wanting to go through the whole list of 8500 names because he thinks if he is going to spend 2 grand on a name then he wants to see every option available but now the list is just way to long to go through so the buyer gets frustrated and goes somewhere else.

Brand Bucket in my opinion made a huge mistake by accepting way to many mediocre names and now I think they are rethinking that policy and are slowing down the process. You will see a big drop soon in the amount of names listed there. The domainers who thought they were some superstar naming guru because they got names accepted at Brand Bucket and now has not made any sales is going to start dropping all those mediocre names that were accepted and the names will start falling off of Brand Bucket's list.

 

[svede]

I don't mind it being a restrictive process, because that means more value to the enduser, which means that the names on the site get more attention and less wading through junk like hookbox said...BUT I really wish they would give you at least some indicator of when they will review your names... like even where you are in the queue... it is a lot easier to wait if you see progress and have some clue to where your domains are in the process. And like the OP said, communication is key....

 

[bazabizo]

HookBox and Svede... love you guys

 

[venturefile.com]

Well with the probable flood of names that they have I am sure they are considering cutting down on mediocre names and just going with the best of the best.. But yeah they should have a mechanism in place which tells you when you can expect to be reviewed..

 

[bazabizo]

YEs, but what about the existing mediocre names? These represent at least 60% of the existing marketplace!
To get ride of these 5,000 names you need 8 years of continuous sales OR refund 50K listing fees and delist the names... what they are doing now (cutting down) is for the future, but the problem is the current state not the upcoming!

 

[svede]

And again, the big issue is communication... its their business and they can choose what they want to do to prevent the dilution of quality domains, but PLEASE communicate what you are doing with those who pay to use your website.. I find that most "human problems" are caused by poor communication or complete lack thereof.

 

[NameOmnia]

First and foremost I think it's quite hard to determine with absolute clarity what is a GREAT brandable, a good one and an acceptable one. ( I am not even talking about the crappy ones because some people think that they put together some letters and that makes a brandable )

Great brandables are taken and in most case used and developed. if they are not then the owners don't need to list them on marketplaces like BB because buyers will come anyway. By great brandables I mean one dictionary word catchy names for example

Good brandables...The evaluation process is getting more grey here. What is a good brandable? A typo? Something meaningless but catchy? What are the criteria we should look at. It is not that simple anymore, is it?
With emds it's all about searches and cpc, how many extensions are taken etc...where do we find our compass with brandables?
What sounds nice to an English ear might sound awful in Spanish for example ( IT IS JUST AN EXAMPLE, PLEASE ) or viceversa.

BB had and probably still have a great trend but did you guys ever asked yourself why? Number one they were the first marketplace, second Margot speaks several languages ( as far as I know ) so she can recognize word variations ( = brandables ) in other language than English. They had the ideas of the logos and the marketplace was small enough for someone to browse it in a short period of time.

Personally I don't like domain hacks so I am not happy to see all the .ly extensions there. I also find many domains are similar, some logos are similar so everything is getting more and more confusing, at least to my eyes.
It might be that they are becoming aware they have to make some changes and they are evaluating them. I don't think it's an easy task, though, for the above reasons and some more. Maybe some of you guys could suggest them some new ideas or let them know that you are not happy with the waiting time.

I have never liked waiting for so long and that's one of the reasons I tend not to use those marketplaces but if I had to choose one I would probably still go with them
Just my opinion.

 

[Brandworthy]

I have over 150 names listed, and about 40 pending. I've seen this happen many times, where for unknown reasons they pause the queue for a while. It could simply be that one part of their publishing funnel has backed up a little.

But if you do track their names you can clearly see that the type of names they accept does change. You can see trends come and go. Right now it looks like they have a thing for names ending in "y". About 4 weeks ago it seemed that pure 6L brandables were more in favour.

If it's of any interest I've had 2 sales in past month. No idea how many other sales they're closed. To me it's a numbers game. I expect to sell ~5% of names listed within 1 year. I've stopped submitting until I see how last 40 submissions go however.

 

[DomainVP]

The last time Michael Krell posted his sales from Brand Bucket was on December 17. He was posting sales every week and nothing for the past month. He now has 880 names listed. I had said before that the only reason he was making so many sales is because his names were the bulk of the names being listed at the time. At that time he had around 850 names. So since he has only added 30 names in the past two months his sales have dropped because that small amount of names gets lost in the sea of 8500 names now.

Agreed 100%. That floodgate of terrible names they accepted was a bad decision. I speculate that there was more to the Krell connection then anyone was ever let onto. Again it's just speculation but to let 1 person just flood a service with names that weren't all that stellar, there has to be some kind of insider kick-back going on. I'm sure it will be refuted, but common sense says otherwise.

First and foremost I think it's quite hard to determine with absolute clarity what is a GREAT brandable, a good one and an acceptable one. ( I am not even talking about the crappy ones because some people think that they put together some letters and that makes a brandable )

Great brandables are taken and in most case used and developed. if they are not then the owners don't need to list them on marketplaces like BB because buyers will come anyway. By great brandables I mean one dictionary word catchy names for example

It's not that hard to put together brandable names. There was actually an older BB study where someone had listed all of the sold names on BB. If you broke the list down you could see what makes for a seller on BB.

Also, yes it helps to know the etymology of words.

My theory on it all, as stated in previous posts months ago, is that they noticed a market downturn and was planning on brining on more names at lower prices to make up for any lost volume. They flooded their marketplace, but hurt their reputation for having quality names. So back to the original gameplan it appears.

I have pulled all of my names from brandable marketplaces.

 

[12345]

Hey, Guys,

The queue is currently a bit behind because of the holidays. I haven't been very active on NP in general over the last few weeks because of the holidays as well.

BB had a great month of December, and I have sold a couple of names over the last few weeks. I've had weeks when I have sold 4 or 5 names on BB, and I have had weeks when I haven't sold any. It's completely reasonable to expect this.

For people waiting for names to be approved on BB or not, I would recommend again that you put up some kind of page saying that the name is for sale. I've sold 4 names this month that I haven't owned for more than a month (which is crazy!). If I just had them going to a generic GD page, I doubt they would have sold.

 

[bazabizo]

Hey, Guys,

The queue is currently a bit behind because of the holidays. I haven't been very active on NP in general over the last few weeks because of the holidays as well.

BB had a great month of December, and I have sold a couple of names over the last few weeks. I've had weeks when I have sold 4 or 5 names on BB, and I have had weeks when I haven't sold any. It's completely reasonable to expect this.

For people waiting for names to be approved on BB or not, I would recommend again that you put up some kind of page saying that the name is for sale. I've sold 4 names this month that I haven't owned for more than a month (which is crazy!). If I just had them going to a generic GD page, I doubt they would have sold.

For the first time I disagree with you Michael, the delay is not because of the holidays. The slowdown has started since November and getting worse and worse.

We all put landing pages until acceptance or rejection is in place, but some of us put BB as their priority Brandable marketplace. If the name is rejected there, we would go ahead and put it in another BRandable marketplace or maybe wait for just any offer that comes in and sell it for less.

The business workflow has their acceptance on top. I wish they respect this and tell us frankly if this will ever change or just continue to get delayed further as a silent attempt to drive us from submitting more names?

I expect more from a marketplace that sends me a satisfaction survey after each contact with Customer Support!

 

[12345]

I can assure you that this isn't anything more than a backlog. The problem in November and December was primarily due to the logo backlog which for the most part seems to have been sorted.

 

[margotb]

As always I appreciate the polite discussion and hopefully I can provide some answers here.

The slowdown is partially intentional, but NOT because we're throttling how many names are entering the marketplace -- we are adding as many or more per week over the past two months as we have in the past. We have been focusing on the names in our system that were already approved, and most importantly the ones where the listing fees had been paid, and getting those through to publication. We made a significant change to our logo design process which helped us get through a very large queue of names pending logo design. There are also lots of names that needed some personal attention -- the owners paid but didn't move forward because they needed help with verification, had pricing concerns, etc.

All of this takes up a lot of man hours. Plus, since I'm only human (and also like to be kind to my staff), we all did take some time during the holidays for ourselves in the midst of this cleanup.

The requests for more visibility as to the expected wait time for submissions is noted and we're discussing options, but any "out of the box" ideas are also welcome -- feel free to DM me anytime.

 

[Nerevar]

Does BrandBucket publish their volume of monthly sales / the number of names sold? I would like to see that very much, and I suspect that many people would.

E.g. "In December we sold 10 names, listed for $1,100 to $8,000, with the average of $2,500 per name."

 

[hookbox]

Does BrandBucket publish their volume of monthly sales / the number of names sold? I would like to see that very much, and I suspect that many people would.

E.g. "In December we sold 10 names, listed for $1,100 to $8,000, with the average of $2,500 per name."

No they removed all sales when they updated the site a few months ago.

 

[ohassim]

Does BrandBucket publish their volume of monthly sales / the number of names sold? I would like to see that very much, and I suspect that many people would.

E.g. "In December we sold 10 names, listed for $1,100 to $8,000, with the average of $2,500 per name."

Selling 10 names in 1 month is impressive...Congrats on all the sales!

Can you advise how much names you have listed with them? and of the names that sold were they 1 word Brandables or 2 word Brandables? Thanks