Not every bid is a bid to win
MapleDots came back to Namepros and detailed an auction battle that he had with Huge Domains. The domain name was CanadianRed.com and he won the auction at $1,280.
Huge Domain bid $1255 USD for CanadianRed.com
I had to go to $1,280 to get the domain.
I posted this for all the folks that keep saying Huge Domain bots stop bidding at $150-$250
There you have the evidence…. they have definitely increased the amounts they are bidding at.
Now there has been a lot of conversation over the years about GoDaddy bidder id’s. I started calling for them over 5 years ago. There were many times that GoDaddy reps came out and said no bidder id’s.
Things got spicy in March 2019
Paul Nicks published a post about employees bidding on names at GoDaddy auctions.
From the article:
On March 11, a GoDaddy customer contacted us with serious allegations against multiple employees. These allegations alluded to employees potentially participating in auctions, shill bidding (coordinating bids to drive prices higher), and providing insider information to clients.
Paul did mention that certain things were not found,
To be clear, our investigation uncovered NO evidence that this employee used any confidential customer information for personal gain, or that he conducted shill-bidding on auctions.
In April of 2019, surprise! Bidder id’s
Each bidder will be given a unique bidder identification number, which will be different and unrelated to the customer account number to prevent social engineering. Bidder identification numbers will be automatically assigned sequentially, and they can not be changed by a bidder. The only way for a bidder to get a new or different bidder ID is to create or use another GoDaddy Auctions account.
During the course of an auction, the individual bidders will continue be masked as they are now (“Bidder 1,” “Bidder 2,”…etc). At the conclusion of the auction, participants in the auction will be able to see the unique bidder ID number for all participants in the auction.
It did not take long for people to find out what the bidder id was for HugeDomains. Bob Hawkes suggested they should register it for vanity reasons.
Now one of the reasons why the id’s are a string of numbers is because GoDaddy did not want buyers being bid up and targeted. Joe Styler had noticed and mentioned posts on Namepros where people talked about bidding up Frank Schilling on NameJet in years gone by.
That does not seem to be working completely. There are people making assumptions based on when a bid comes in, that it’s Huge Domains and they bid on the name just to get them to bid more.
In the MapleDots thread, one member mentioned,
I’ve actually had a pretty good day running up the amount my opposition had to pay to win today. A couple of true dogs got bid up to 300. It is just something I do for fun…I love it when the bots go crazy bidding against me for a name that will never sell!
Another commenter suggested everyone chime in:
Why not play the HD game against HD. Any domain HD is likely to bid, let us Bid up and let them run out if their budget. They are a Huge Company, surely they work on predefined budgets every qtr
While discussing this thread earlier with someone on the phone, they told me they knew of a few guys who did this. Bid on domain names they don’t want, just looking to bid up other domainers.
I asked if this was centered on Huge Domains? He told me the person he knew the best said they just really do it for shits and giggles.
A lot of people like to focus on seeing an auction get that first bid of $12 toward the end of the auction and then they are there with a $17 bid and look to see what happens.
As I have said before it’s good to be GoDaddy. Because now they got people just bidding for shits and giggles.
