sales Swetha’s Sales – The Truth May Shock You!

[Digital Nomad]

Here is a nice article posted on NameBio.com by Michael Sumner the CEO of NameBio.com. He asked for Swetha's aka @DNGear username and password to log into her Afternic account to confirm the sales once and for all, read it all below or go to https://namebio.com/blog/swethas-sales-the-truth-may-shock-you/

Swetha’s Sales – The Truth May Shock You!​

Yesterday there was quite the stir on Twitter after Swetha reported another batch of jaw-dropping .xyz sales. User @jackdomainer did some research and found that an overwhelming majority of her sales were still not developed, which he thought was suspicious given the price tags. Theories started flying around, and even the Castello Brothers and Rick Schwartz chimed in with vague statements alluding to some grand conspiracy.

Grab some popcorn and read it for yourself here:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1596296988966154241

The low rate of development was the only “proof” provided so far. But why report fake sales? Well isn’t it obvious? To boost the value of her own assets so she can dump them on unsuspecting wholesalers, hoping to reproduce her incredible success, for inflated prices.


But ask yourself this… how many times have you seen Swetha wholesaling premium .xyz domains? I may have missed it, but I don’t recall seeing that.


For years I’ve been in the awkward position of publishing these sales reports. All I can go on is a screenshot, which she graciously provided for every single sale report since the day she started sharing. But screenshots can be faked relatively easily.


I could ask her to share her screen with me while she logs in to a marketplace, but even that could be faked with browser extensions that modify the page live. It’s more difficult than faking a screenshot, but not impossible. Not good enough.


To get a definitive answer, I reached out to Swetha and asked for the unthinkable. I asked if she would give me her username and password to her Afternic account, so I could log in myself and verify all the sales she has ever reported at this marketplace.





I felt bad even asking. Here she is sharing her valuable sales data with the community, all while being given endless grief about it. And now some stranger is asking to log in to her Afternic account. A lesser person would have just said “fuck it”, stopped reporting sales, and told me to go away. But you know what… she agreed! It was at this moment I knew it was all true and factual, but still, I’m going to “due diligence” the heck out of this.


So I quickly logged in to her Afternic account and visited this URL to get a dump of all the raw sales data. Then I started taking screenshots of her sales summary page. I logged out and let her know I was done so she could change her password. Then I started diving in.


One by one I checked the sales against what we have in our database. Every single one of them was perfect. Except I discovered something shocking. Quite a few of the sales were never reported. However good you think she’s doing based on what she has reported, she’s actually doing even better. That’s insane!


Now remember, Swetha has been reporting sales for quite a while now. All this time, she had no idea I would ever ask her to log in to any of her accounts, or which one(s) I would ask for. So if she was going to fabricate sales, she would have no way of knowing to always keep Afternic clean, as opposed to DAN or Escrow.com or whatever. Thus I now feel 100% confident in all her reports, not just the Afternic ones.


I also now feel confident in saying that Swetha is probably in the Top 100 of all domain investors who have ever lived, and she is probably in the Top 5 of all investors who aren’t part of the “old guard”. Maybe even #1 of the new generation.


But more than that, she is a kindhearted individual who is generously sharing what is working for her even though it makes new acquisitions more expensive for her. And even when the haters show up in droves, she stays the course. Thank you Swetha.


Is it possible that she’s a shill for the registry, and they’re creating hundreds of accounts across multiple marketplaces to buy the domains from her? I mean anything is possible. But it seems highly improbable that they would lock up funds and trust that she would always give them back, just to create the appearance of demand. They don’t benefit from the wholesale aftermarket, so it would just be for the sake of hand regs.


And then how do you explain the ones that are developed? And how do you explain other people getting large XYZ sales? Believe what you want, and skepticism is generally a healthy thing, but this theory seems so out there and lacking in any evidence that I have to think anyone who believes it is jealous (or loves conspiracy theories more than Rob Monster).


Here is the full screenshot I took of her sales summary page, with unreported sales blacked out for her privacy. Again, I took this screenshot myself while personally logged in to her Afternic account, it was not shared with me. I saw it with my own eyes.

Check out the screenshot of Swetha's sales at: https://namebio.com/assets/swetha-sales.jpg

Source: https://namebio.com/blog/swethas-sales-the-truth-may-shock-you/

 

[NickB]

If she was a more vociferous, white male, who had invested in DOTCOMs, would we even be having these conversations?

I personally have not seen any racist or sexist stereotyping - I have called it out a few times on here and would not hesitate to do so again if that was the case.......

 

[Lox]

Can anybody explain to me here why the difference between her Sale price and Payout amount on a screenshot we see is almost never exactly 20%?

All my sales on Afternic are exactly 20% (their commissions) difference between the two columns.

Regardless of the currency and Afternic's partners, when the deal is executed and price is set on Afternic backend in US Dollars, there should be 20% difference between sale and payout.

Am I missing something?

link

 

[rh2000]

If she was a more vociferous, white male, who had invested in DOTCOMs, would we even be having these conversations?

She could be purple and people we would question the sales if she was the only one selling them at the rate she sells xyz and everybody else is barley making one sale a month and she makes 20 sales every month. Anything out of the norm that happens on a consistent basis will get questioned.

 

[Bob Hawkes]

I know she has a large portfolio or around 20K domains I think, but the .XYZ registry has around 4.7M total registrations.

Brad, I don't think that is the right way to look at it. By no means all of the 4.7M are for sale - some are in use, some are sitting for possible use, etc. It would be like saying BB have roughly 120,000 names from the entire set of 161 million registered .com, yet they have a disproportionate number of sales, and say something is wrong. They disproportionately sell names because their names are actively for sale and they are very selective regarding name quality.

We should only compare .xyz names that are listed for sale and have quality to merit a high asking price. There is no doubt that Swetha has a large proportion of the quality xyz names, assembled over years, and she also seems very efficient in getting her names BIN listed at Afternic and Dan.

If talking 5-figure sales, the comparable number is the number of .xyz names with a BIN asking price of at least $10k. I just had a look at that at Dan, and there are about 43,750. I think Swetha accounts for more than 30% of the Dan xyz at that price range. More importantly, she has many, not all, of the great names.

I don't see it as surprising that she accounts for a majority, not all, of the high-value sales.

I can't immediately find it, but somewhere on NamePros she posted 1000 of her best .xyz. A truly impressive list.

Has anyone else in history managed to accumulate so many of the great names in one extension? I know some of the pioneer investors accumulated great .com portfolios, but there were a number, so I suspect no one dominated .com the way she dominates .xyz, but I was not around domaining back in those days.

Swetha is truly an inspiration. She has shown that having a plan, discipline and patience, a belief in the quality of your names and pricing accordingly, scaling a portfolio, and getting almost everything priced BIN and effectively listed can pay off big time. She also has a keen sense of what makes a good brand term in the modern world.

Bob

 

[FolioTeam]

Can anybody explain to me here why the difference between her Sale price and Payout amount on a screenshot we see is almost never exactly 20%?

All my sales on Afternic are exactly 20% (their commissions) difference between the two columns.

Regardless of the currency and Afternic's partners, when the deal is executed and price is set on Afternic backend in US Dollars, there should be 20% difference between sale and payout.

Am I missing something?

Commission is 20% only if your domains are selling for 5k and below

 

[Bob Hawkes]

Hats off to @Michael – he does not write blog posts like this often, but this should go down as one of the greatest things written in our industry this year.

It took bravery to tackle the controversial subject, and to even ask Swetha for access to her Afternic account for a few hours.

This should absolutely refute any that still had doubt. Will the growth in .xyz continue? Who knows. Certainly the NFT and crypto issues will not be helpful. But there is no doubt that the reported sales are authentic.

I can't believe that people kept pushing if a name is not developed immediately that casts doubt on a sale. I have visited a lot of sites, or tried to, in the various analyses. Every extension there are many, many major sales that the name has no meaningful use, even names that sold for millions. Sometimes the DNS has not even changed. I am sure most investors have seen that with names they have sold. There are various reasons that names don't get developed.

Anyway, I mainly wanted to thank Michael and Swetha for, hopefully, finally, putting this to rest.

Bob

 

[Sjpals]

If she was a more vociferous, white male, who had invested in DOTCOMs, would we even be having these conversation

"A lesser person would have just said “fuck it”, stopped reporting sales, and told me to go away"

If she was a man, then no, we would not be having these conversations and a man would have said 'fuck it' and told them to go away.

 

[Sam1234]

.

 

[Eric Lyon]

Note: Using development as a factor after a sales report is a double-edged sword. There are a few different directions it can go.

Undeveloped Direction 1: Blank page, Under construction page, or asset does not resolve = This is more than likely someone that acquired an asset to eventually develop it as an end-user, but hasn't completed the development yet or is waiting for a development round of funding.

Undeveloped Direction 2: Parked Page or Affiliate campaign = This could go either way. It may be someone that acquired the asset to develop it, but awaiting more funding, or using monetization to gather development funding. It could also be a reseller trying to figure out how to cover the assets renewal costs before they find someone to resell it to for a profit. Unfortunately, it may also indicate a hyped sales report that fell through or never happened.

Undeveloped Direction 3: Sales Lander = This may or may not be a reseller or indication the sales report was not accurate (E.g. sale fell through or an attempt to pump hype to find a reseller to invest into it). Checking the assets history (waybackmachine and whois) can be an indicator if it ever changed hands or the sales lander company the DNS points to changed.

In conclusion: One can't conclusively knock a sales reports authenticity Soley based on current development progress. While there are those out there that fake sales reports to hype a domain or even an entire extension to generate sales for an individual or registry, we cannot lump everyone into the same unethical basket. It can sometimes take hours, days or even weeks (months) of research to positively identify intent to deceive and even then, it may not be all-inconclusive.

At the end of the day, lack of development could simply be a reseller that may or may not have paid way too much for an asset they will be left holding the bag for and never find an end-user that brings a profit to resell to. There's no unethical intent when it comes to bad investments (Unless they were blatantly deceived to spend that much). It's a buyer's responsibility to do their own due diligence prior to making a binding purchase offer or clicking the BUY NOW button.

I know I've bought domains in the past when I was too tired to see straight and regretted it the next day, but that was my fault, for not going in with a level head and doing my due diligence first. Impulse buys can sometimes be the biggest hard knocks learning experiences and mega losses we ever have.

To each their own.

We all do it differently.

That's just my opinion.

 

[jhm]

I personally suspect that Swetha's sales are mostly fake. The suspicion for me was never that she was posting fake sales to become "popular", but rather that she was involved in money laundering. Money laundering of course requires that the sales actually occur. So proving that you had sales doesn't prove you are not involved in money laundering. I don't think "enough is enough". If your sales seem suspicious then anyone who wants to can say so. The whole idea that this so-so TLD that is known to have tons of fake sales and seems to have their own marketing team gets tons of massive sales, mainly via a single otherwise no-name seller is suspicious IMO. My suspicions don't make her a money launderer, but the fact that so many professional sellers doubt the sales (which look inherently suspicious) should be justification enough for people to voice their doubts. I don't think anyone has to just "accept" that she is the greatest seller in the world.

I don't know any professionals in the forum (or outside the forum) even considering that kind of thing. They mind their own business, frankly. People can have an opinion, but if those going there have no concrete evidence, then it's simply slanderous (and offensive)

 

[Sam1234]

.

 

[Sam1234]

I'm sure she probably is not involved in anything shady and I'm sorry for stating my opinion so casually in this case.

 

[jhm]

I consider professional sellers to be others that are in the business of selling domains and it seems like a lot of those people here think her sales look suspicious. It's impossible for anyone to have "concrete" evidence, obviously.

Some people just want her to have a problem I feel, it eats them up. If people focussed on their own s***, I think we'd see progress

 

[bmugford]

Brad, I don't think that is the right way to look at it. By no means all of the 4.7M are for sale - some are in use, some are sitting for possible use, etc. It would be like saying BB have roughly 120,000 names from the entire set of 161 million registered .com, yet they have a disproportionate number of sales, and say something is wrong. They disproportionately sell names because their names are actively for sale and they are very selective regarding name quality.

We should only compare .xyz names that are listed for sale and have quality to merit a high asking price. There is no doubt that Swetha has a large proportion of the quality xyz names, assembled over years, and she also seems very efficient in getting her names BIN listed at Afternic and Dan.

If talking 5-figure sales, the comparable number is the number of .xyz names with a BIN asking price of at least $10k. I just had a look at that at Dan, and there are about 43,750. I think Swetha accounts for more than 30% of the Dan xyz at that price range. More importantly, she has many, not all, of the great names.

I don't see it as surprising that she accounts for a majority, not all, of the high-value sales.

I can't immediately find it, but somewhere on NamePros she posted 1000 of her best .xyz. A truly impressive list.

Has anyone else in history managed to accumulate so many of the great names in one extension? I know some of the pioneer investors accumulated great .com portfolios, but there were a number, so I suspect no one dominated .com the way she dominates .xyz, but I was not around domaining back in those days.

Swetha is truly an inspiration. She has shown that having a plan, discipline and patience, a belief in the quality of your names and pricing accordingly, scaling a portfolio, and getting almost everything priced BIN and effectively listed can pay off big time.

Bob

Most people weren't actually questioning the sales though (small minority where in the grand scheme of things)....they were/are sceptical of the extension itself - easier to label every .xyz doubter a Swetha hater I suppose....

Muddy the waters enough and it leads to this situation where account details have to be shared because people can't have a reasonable discussion and end up getting labelled by a small minority of sanctimonious keyboard warriors - absolute joke......

Well, with all that said it is a unique situation that is clearly not easily repeatable.
It if was, it would have been repeated.

That is the primary reason it gets questions.

But as @NickB said there is a very small minority that are really actually pushing back on the legitimacy of the sales. I have no doubt money changed hands for these domains.

However, when people who ask reasonable questions based on statistics are also labeled "haters", that is just a lazy response.

I also think it is ridiculous that Swetha was asked to turn over the account info to verify this, but it also has nothing to do with being a women. It has to do with the uniqueness of the situation.

Many men like Mike Mann have had the legitimacy of their sales questioned in the past, among others.

Brad

 

[Lox]

1. Stop Guessing
2. Start Knowing

1. You must be prepared to spend significant time during the info / due diligence process.
2. Thanks to sector-specific (art, blockchain, crypto, nft, web3, wallet etc) the xyz becomes part of the rebel movements (culture).

Research & follow. The registry is investing (focus on) in adaptation.

Example November 16, 2022

Remote teams at Spotify and Nike are using innovative startup PizzaTime.xyz for morale-boosting pizza party experiences (blog link)


Regards

 

[Sjpals]

Many men like Mike Mann have had the legitimacy of their sales questioned in the past, among others.

Then, my apologies. I have just never heard of anyone else being given as much grief as Swetha has.

 

[OceanKing]

From the begining i was suspecting these sales. Even junks of swetha's are selling for 6 figures. but i kept quit thinking i am the only one getting this though.

 

[marijuanadomain]

I really don’t care s/he makes money but if you really want to dig to the issue,
Show us the tax returns. Trump..

Follow the money

 

[Ostrados]

Lets think about the conspiracy theory part here, is it rational?

Conspiracy Theory 1: fraud xyz promotion
Lets say xyz wanted to promote their extension among us by faking mouth watering aftermarket sales, then the smart thing to do to pull off such a plan is to hire multiple Swetha(s) to make thing looks natural. Why would they make it so stupid and so obvious by putting all the sales in one account?!

Conspiracy Theory 2: money laundary
If this is a big money laundry operation then why they go public and announce the sales? Wouldn't it be wiser and safer to stay private away from suspecting eyes? And again why would they be stupid enough to focus on only 1 Swetha (insteaf of multiple agents) and only 1 extension (instead of zillions of tlds available)?


Xyz is an ugly extension I was one of the early crtisizers and I still see it as an ugly extension. But lets face it, web3 is already ugly with ugly NFTs, legless Metaverse and ugly mess of crypto coins. Maybe this is just transient phase towards true web3 or maybe the future will be truly ugly.. who knows.

 

[bookname]

Why digging into someone else business?
I don't really care who sell what. All I care is what I can sell.
Too much time wasting on this topic already.
Give her a break!

This is the best post so far , peace

 

[MadAboutDomains]

Why are some pretending that providing proof of sales is somehow harming her in some way? Dillusional or what.

Are the listings for "Swetha.xyz" on namebio going to be updated to the correct marketplaces instead of a website that the sales didn't actually occur on?

Can those who kept saying they are "all verified"... Including those saying that dnjournal sales are verified too, going to eat their words now too? They were about as verified as the future 1 trillion dollar sale of toptoptop...toptoptop.top

Yes there's a healthy degree of scepticism on here... Take it for what it is, you're on a domain forum.

 

[MadAboutDomains]

If she was a more vociferous, white male, who had invested in DOTCOMs, would we even be having these conversations?

What has that got to do with anything? I think you may need to take your head out of the television set...

You've come to the conclusion that skin colour or gender is the underlying reason why people are a bit skeptical? Not the number of sales, the prices, the frequency and the low quality of the domains?

As for vociferousness, she is the definition of the word.

Christ almighty give me strength!!

 

[-EM-]

Is this some kind of ad for her and you?
There are so many way to fake sales and it depends how credible you want to show yourself. Just by verifying the afternic page to check if the sales are there is just childish investigation. Why even bother?!

 

[-EM-]

Why digging into someone else business?
I don't really care who sell what. All I care is what I can sell.
Too much time wasting on this topic already.
Give her a break!

The domain market is highly dependent on previous sales. So yes, you and everyone cares a lot on who sells what.

 

[twiki]

I have been suspecting in the past that these are shill sales. But later I gradually started to believe they are real - but probably with a twist. I still believe there is a twist to it. But I can't point out of anything shady going on. It's probably a domainer with a particular sales method, regardless of transaction venue. Maybe she promotes her names in a specific manner to specific buyers.

Note - @johnn is right, we should focus on our own business not digging into others.

However, it might still keep you wondering at times, because of the sheer difference to anyone else's. I still wonder, but it doesn't keep me awake at night.

Anyway - I believe she has a method; whatever that method is. A network - definitely. Possibly a partnership with some branding agencies. Or another such channel. Maybe the buyers are in the SPAC area and they never took up, hence the un-development. But most domains bought are not developed anyway. Who knows.

Anyway, it is clear to me that there is some reason these names are sold for high $. But again I have no proof so far of anything like shill going on.

Back to my domains, where I (and you) should be.