dougs - 4:45 pm on Sep 9, 2007 (gmt 0)

There were about 100 people who turned up on the Thursday of the event. I am not a domainerer but there were the big guys from Fabulous, TrafficZ, Sedo etc plus a large amount of people who seemed to have all of the best .co.uk's in the world and many of the best .com's. There were some interesting talks during the day, but a lot of my time was spent networking and chatting. Absolutely fascinating for me to see what the big boys were doing in the industry.

Thursday night about 40 of us went out for dinner, courtesy of Sedo. again fascinating.

Friday was some more talks, including a brief seo overview from JasonD. It became apparent that the domainer guys have no idea about seo.

The auction kicked off in the afternoon and I do feel that many people had come to watch. This was the first ever .co.uk auction sale and hence there were about 50 people registered to buy, but about 150 in the room.

Most of the domains reserved at £10000 were bid on, some sold, some didn't hit the reserve but sold later. The big domains www.sport.co.uk, www.sex.co.uk, www.fly.co.uk etc all had reserves set above £50,000 and hence I believe many people were never going to bid on these. No one was willing to risk that type of money in an unknown market.

www.fly.co.uk was purchased on behalf of www.asap.co.uk as it a perfect fit for their business. The bidding on this domain started at £50,000 and very quickly finished off at £87,500 ($175,000)

Personally I felt it was very succesfull, even though there were few very big sales. But I put this down to it being the first ever one and many people unsure what to do.

I also know there were some large sales that occured because of people meeting each other, but these were sales not in the actual auction.

Regards

Doug