August 20, 2007
Sedo - How 3 German students unleashed an industry firestorm in the midst of the .Com Crash
Sedo is the one marketplace that I’ve derived most of my sales, and appears to be quickly becoming the marketplace of choice for most domainers.
Sedo is an acryonym for ‘Search Engine for Domain Offers’ and was born from an idea to allow a purchaser to negotiate directly with a seller, thereby going beyond the auction services that most domain marketplaces provided at the time. They opened in January 2000 after being dreamed up by German student Tim Schumacher, Ulrich Preisner, and Marious Wuerzner. After adding Europe’s premier web hosting company 1&1 Internet AG expanded quickly to the UK, Spain, and France. By 2002, they had reached the US, just in time to watch the bubble burst and catch the growing panic of domainers to sell fast, and the matched excitement of domain speculators to snap up domain names at firesale prices.
Things I like about Sedo: They are responsive, have reasonable rates, and get their domains sold. They also have a simple affiliate and partner integration program that makes it easy to get started in adding their services to your site.
Things I don’t like about Sedo: they limit seller exposure by having a crowded front page, squeezing them for premium promotion services, and have too many crappy domains for buyers to sift through, and for quality sellers to get noticed.
From their ‘about’ page: Sedo handles close to 3 million dollars of sales per month, and as of February 2007 had 8 million domains in their sales database. Currently employing close to 100 employees from more than 18 countries at offices located in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Cologne, Germany.
