Privacy: Reasons For And Against

[VURG]

I think that one of the biggest issues with domain names is privacy. Firstly there is privacy of the buyer and secondly there is privacy of the seller. From an article in the DNJournal, I've read about how they expect that 50-90% of all sales are private which would lead me to believe that there is a chance that there are hundreds of domains that have sold for over $1 million that most people don't know about.

DNJournal is always listing public sales of domains. I am just interested to get some opinions on what benefits there are of having public sales and what benefits there are of having private sales.

I'll start with what I know:

Benefits Of Public Sales To The Buyer
-Free Traffic to their site

Benefits Of Private Sales To The Buyer
-Don't get spam by other domain sellers
-Don't receive criticism by people who think they it wasn't good value for money
-Privacy in financial status

Benefits Of Public Sales To The Seller/Broker
-Generates interest in other domains for sale
-Shows evidence to others of their skills in picking and selling good names

Benefits Of Private Sales To The Seller/Broker
-Previous buyers don't get upset if different buyers are buying similar names for different prices
-Privacy in financial status

Benefits Of Public Sales To The DN Community
-Allows people to determine better valuations of domains based on previous sales info

 

[IAmAllanShore]

A lot might be "potential TM issue" domains that the buyer doesn't want to disclose as a giant yellow "LOOK OVER HERE - WE PAY YOU TO GO AWAY!" flag.

As a buyer, I don't like the amounts I'm willing to pay get out typically; either because I don't want some folks to think I'm too cheap to mess with, while I don't want others to think that just because I've spent $x on a similar domain before, doesn't automatically make that the starting position of any negotiations.

And lastly, some sales may be money laundering ( :notme: ) of some sort and not disclosed for obvious reasons (Hey, they are perfectly liquid and can be bought/sold anywhere with little to no paper trail through fictitious entities... if I was a bad guy, I'd see a good opportunity in a non-transparent market.).

-Allan :gl: