Last week Flippa announced the end of the free unlimited relistings on their platform. There was a channel to list domains for free on Flippa forever, namely valuating 15 domains on their “crowd appraisal” experiment, getting free credits for it and listing the domains using these credits and than relisting domains again and again if unsold. Just 2 days after the end of free relistings, Flippa also announced that they will not give free credits for domain appraisal. Since there is a high pressure on Flippa to increase the views of the auctions, this is a great move again to reduce the number of listed domains. According to their blog post, they awarded $100,000 free credits to 9,000 appraisers, so approximately 10,000 domains were listed for free using this method (and high percent of them were relisted several times). So it is clear that most of the domains currently in auction was listed for free and we can expect dramatical decrease in the number of domain auctions.
Over-appraised domains on Flippa
Flippa’s domain appraisal is an idealistic approach for domain valuation. While it is really not easy to computationally predict domain prices, it is even worse to crowd value domains without appropriate knowledge. Especially when valuation is public and you get money for valuation. It is easy to say that a domain registered a month before worth 4 figures but when the same domain goes to auction, there is no $1 bid on it. Thus, Flippa’s crowd sourced domain appraisal is a clear fail, an absolutely useless random number generator for many zero worth domains. If I were Flippa, I would not only stop giving free credits for valuation but I would retire the whole project, since it decreases the credibility of Flippa Domains in general.
Hi Zsolt ~
Thanks for your feedback. I agree with you about how all these changes will continue to help improve auction visibility. I also agree that the appraisal tool has its benefits, in an idealistic way, that are yet to be realized in a substantive manner.
One thing that is clear is that many new Flippa buyers and sellers, and probably (though unconfirmed at first glance) new domainers, use this tool. There is a massive opportunity to provide educational resources for these customers, which we hope to connect to the tool in due time.
Hi Kevin,
thank you for clarifying your goal with the crowd appraisal tool. We will see what happens there when “bad faith” appraisers with the sole purpose of getting credits disappear. Maybe you can have a fresh start from here and build something better but this is a difficult challenge.