news Results and Analysis of 2016 Domain Industry Awards at THE Domain Conference

[Addison]

The 2016 domain industry awards were announced today at The Domain Conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

These are the 2016 winners:

• Developer of the Year: Michael Cyger
• Blogger of the Year: Elliot Silver
• Registry of the Year: .CLUB
• Registrar of the Year: GoDaddy
• Broker of the Year: Dave Evanson, SEDO
• Domain Investor of the Year: Michael Berkens
• Domain Company of the Year: SEDO
• Goodwill Ambassador, 2016: Ron Jackson
• 2016 Hall of Fame Inductees:
  • Nat Cohen
  • Gary Chernoff

Analysis:

These awards are run by incompetent outsiders who have no grasp on the domain industry, and sorry to say, the voters are just as clueless: they vote for whoever they've heard of, with no grasp on whether they qualify or should be awarded.

Developer of the Year is the most laughable award every year.

• Who won it in previous years? Adam Dicker. The guy who uses out-of-the-box Wordpress templates and articles from other websites to fill in the empty space.
• Who was nominated this year? Elliot Silver, who had to publicly denounce his nomination because he admittedly is not a developer.
• Who wins it this year? Michael Cyger, a guy who doesn't know the first thing about development. Don't get me wrong, Michael Cyger is a brilliant businessman and publisher, but he is not a developer by any means. He will tell you that.
• Who should have won? Michael of NameBio or Paul of NamePros. You know, real *bleeping* developers.

Registrar of the year is GoDaddy? I must be in a bad dream. This award obviously belongs to Uniregistry, Dynadot, or NameSilo. I'll save my breath on this one because it's self explanatory. If you don't know, search GoDaddy and read. They're the worst registrar and always have been. Their low prices are/were the only reason anyone uses/used them.

Broker of the year is Dave Evanson? For those of you who are clueless because you only read the sales charts and voted for him based on that, Dave is a terrible broker. The only reason he closes big sales is because they're handed to him on a silver platter by Sedo. Have you ever actually tried contacting Dave? If you're not a famous industry personality, he will not respond to your calls or emails, despite you having (or your clients having) tens-to-hundreds of thousands to invest in domains. He deserves no award.

Domain Company of the Year? Sedo, the company that hasn't evolved, innovated, or done a single impressive thing in ten years. Do you know what they've done in recent years?

• Become more greedy.
• Increase their commission.
• Refuse to fix the millions of bugs that are reported to them.
• Continue to employ incompetent brokers like Dave Evanson.

I could go on, but out of respect for the other winners, I will stop here.

What a joke.

@Domain Shane, please pursue your idea for how these awards should be run. We must stop this madness.

 

[N-A]

It's about properly educating voters on each nominee

In my Joe Blow Broker of the Year post (lost in the banter), I mention a bio as to why they were nominated to be included as well. I agree.

 

[equity78]

In my Joe Blow Broker of the Year post (lost in the banter), I mention a bio as to why they were nominated to be included as well. I agree.

The hard thing with Brokers David is a lot of them do not reveal data and will not reveal it. Ryan Colby may sell more than anybody, but he says he does not report his sales as a courtesy to clients. Addison made his thoughts known about Dave Evanson, others love Dave. They have no real knowledge about Dave they just see Sedo's tweets. I think most regard Andrew Rosener as the best, I know I do. There are some other men and women that do a great job under the radar and getting the proper metrics on them might be difficult for specific criteria.

 

[N-A]

The hard thing with Brokers David is a lot of them do not reveal data and will not reveal it. Ryan Colby may sell more than anybody, but he says he does not report his sales as a courtesy to clients. Addison made his thoughts known about Dave Evanson, others love Dave. They have no real knowledge about Dave they just see Sedo's tweets. I think most regard Andrew Rosener as the best, I know I do. There are some other men and women that do a great job under the radar and getting the proper metrics on them might be difficult for specific criteria.

Thanks for informing me about the brokerage category. Maybe, a bio isn't the most feasible way of going about it there. Nevertheless, much like all other categories, it needs tweaking as well. The mention of a bio can be applicable to all other categories though.

Here's an interesting read on how the nomination process of the Oscars runs, pay more attention to "THE FORMULA FOR GETTING NOMINATED" (which links to the real criteria, this is just the tl;dr version): http://mentalfloss.com/article/54560/how-are-oscar-nominees-chosen

I'm sure if there was procedure such as this in place, one not even as stringent, there'd be absolutely no bickering. Of course, unless a deserving person kept getting passed over, year, after year, after year (e.g. Leonardo DiCaprio).

But, it's of my opinion, as it stands, is because one (or more) category is a joke, all of the awards handed out mean nothing. Absolutely nothing to anyone else giving or receiving the award.

 

[Addison]

The hard thing with Brokers David is a lot of them do not reveal data and will not reveal it. Ryan Colby may sell more than anybody, but he says he does not report his sales as a courtesy to clients.

The necessary information is not confidential so it would not be a problem. The information we'd need is abstracted and doesn't contain personally identifiable information:

• Total number of years as a full-time domain broker.
  
• Total revenue in sales this month, this year, and all time.
• Total profit in sales this month, this year, and all time.
• Total number of sales this month, this year, and all time.
• Testimonials from clients about experiences with the broker.

These are merely examples with a few seconds of thought. Anyone running a competent awards poll can come up with more or better ones.

The brokers who claim they can't provide generalized totals don't belong in the category anyway, because they're full of it and hiding their lack of success.