Is Clubhouse the next live domain auction disruptor?
At approximately 4:05 pm Tuesday afternoon, Hal Yaffe created an impromptu Clubhouse room: LIVE Domain sales action. Let’s make a deal now! 1,200 .coms.
Hal had one goal in sight: to see if anyone would join the room. He sat in this room in complete silence for 5 minutes before anyone joined.
It was wasn’t long before people began trickling into the room to talk domains. As talks progressed amongst clubbers, a few domains were swapped and then sold.
And in the blink of an eye, the room filled with veterans and newcomers stepping up to the stage in hopes of buying and selling .com domains, averaging 80-90 persons in the room and nearly 700 passing through the room over a six hour time period.
Now add a heartfelt cause — in this case, Bruce Berger’s late sister passing away from cancer last Friday, and this auction grew wings and took a flight to the tune of over $20K in impromptu domain sales — with portions of the proceeds going to a cancer charity of the seller’s choice.
Hats off to first-time auctioneer Hal Yaffe, Bruce Berger, Page Howe, Stefan Youngblood, and a long list of other clubbers that simply went with the flow as the minutes and hours passed. It was a good evening and night of fun, bantering, friendship, and domains.
Some of the notable domain sales* from this Clubhouse action:
- SEOLinkBuilding•com — $1K
- VirtualSportsBook•com — $1K
- GoGyrl•com — $1.2K
- StaySafeMedical•com — $2.5K
*Note: Domain sales were noted as sold, but payment has not been confirmed. It was the responsibility of the buyer and seller to handle peer-to-peer payment in private.
Now in a strange twist of events in a completely different room minutes before Hal would open the record-setting room, the domain Greece•de set the Clubhouse record for a single domain sale reported at $13,426.
NamesCon CEO Soeren von Varchmin donated the domain, and 100% of the proceeds of the sale to the efk.org school foundation.
https://t.co/gFvVuBEiDx is the most expensive domain name sold through @joinClubhouse so far. In a spontaneous charity auction 13246 USD were achieved. Thanks to @svvarchmin for donating this domain name. The money goes to "Entrepreneurs for Knowledge" (https://t.co/S1XCRgYhkY)
— Stefan Wiegard (@adblogger) February 2, 2021
The previous Clubhouse single domain sale record was Drew Rosener purchasing RL•org for $13K from Aishwin Vikhona reported on Jan 22nd.
Just bought https://t.co/ACLD38UiKk on #Clubhouse @joinClubhouse for $13,000 in what I believe is likely the first and certainly the highest domain name transaction to happen on the platform to date! Congrats on a good deal @aishwin! #History #domainnames
— Andrew Rosener (@andrewrosener) January 22, 2021
Clubhouse domain sales are gaining steam for sure. Only time will tell whether or not selling domains via Clubhouse is a fluke or a new cost-friendly, innovative avenue less the barriers of a traditional domain auction.
However, buying and selling domains, especially auctioning domains, via Clubhouse is certainly not perfect.
Nevertheless, Clubhouse contains the necessary ingredients that could prove to be a domain auction disruption should critical adjustments be made.
For now, though, we all await to see what’s next for buying and selling domains via Clubhouse.
What do you make of Clubhouse as a platform to buy and sell domain names?
Great job covering this Alvin- was cool to see unfold last night- no doubt that this is the beginning of something with Domain Auctions on this platform. Very cool that it all happened organically and does expand the domain space. Should be interesting to see where this goes.
Mike
Indeed, Mike.
Very interesting! What other forms of commerce and serendipity might move onto the platform, only time will tell.