ImageBackupSoftware.com sold yesterday for $145 in a no-reserve SnapNames auction primarily promoted on Twitter.   The winner of the domain contest was @Dluzional for his $280 guess and he will receive  a paypal payment of $14.50 (10% of the sales price).

[3/30/09 Update: I’m trying a different variation of the contest using Sedo this week.  Click here for details and to win 5% of sales price.]

Here’s my take on the results..

1. The name sold for a considerably lower price than expected with only 3 bidders involved.  This may have been due to the name itself.  This name has very good metrics and is well matched for a profitable mini site, may not have that eye-catching factor some buyers look for.  I didn’t formally appraise the name before the auction ,  but I was anticipating it would sell for a minimum of $500.

2. I was very pleased with the  exposure the listing received. I tweeted about the auction to my 900 followers and many domainers (@NameSugar, @Yofie, @DanSanchez @ebusinessnames)  were nice enough to re-tweet my posts to my their combined list of 1600+ followers.   As a result, I’m pretty sure most domainers who were on Twitter yesterday knew  about the auction.  My stats show that in the final hours more than 100 people clicked through to my blog and auction listing pages.

3. The auction process itself was pretty buggy. Snapnames was having intermittent problems in the morning and  many attempts to view the auction were failing. In the final minute of the auction, my control panel showed the auction closed at $25.  I announced this but  a friend tweeted back saying he was seeing 3 minutes left with a  $145 current bid.  After viewing  screenshots, we realized that we were seeing two different things.   Not very comforting for a live auction.  I hope this will improve as I am a big fan of Moniker.com and like their tight integration with SnapName’s market place.

What’s next?

I’m pleased with the experiment in general and plan on doing  it again next week.   I received some helpful comments about the contest and am considering changing it to make it a little more  domainer friendy.   I’m going to work with Snapnames to see if we can avoid some of the glitches that were encountered.    And I’m going to pay special attention to the next batch of names,  focusing on ones that have both great metrics and eye-appeal.

In the mean time,  you can usually find me on Twitter every day at @DomainTweeter – where I tweet about domaining and give away the available domain of the day.  Please feel free  to send me a Tweet or DM introuducing yourself.

Hoping to get some additional feedback…

I’m pretty new to blogging (this blog is about two weeks old), but wanted to try to use the comment section of this post to learn more about what you are looking for.  If you have a second was hoping you might be able to answer one or more of the following..

• Were you aware of the domaining contest?
• Can you think of any  specific ways to improve it?
• What did you think of the domain that was listed?
• What type of names are you interested in?
• Any other comments or suggestions?

Thanks!