Pacific Octane

Early to rise at 3:30am is the way that I most like to do it and when I can stumble through my onslaught of emails that have come in from mostly Northern hemisphere folks, I usually have a scroll around a few sites to see what’s happened whilst I’ve been asleep.

I’ve been chatting back and forth with a few really smart people like Simon Pupo from www.NameDrive.com and Rob Taylor of www.Hey.co.uk about where the .au market is, where it’s heading short term and obviously I’m very interested in the long term.  When I was doing my morning stroll through the domain jungle, I went ahead against my better judgement and logged into eBay.com.au.  Apart from seeing what I did about 3 weeks ago which was over 60 listings of anythingunderthasunthatsoundedlikeahalfbakedcrackheadidea.com.au with starting bids of $1,000,000,000,000.00, I suddenly grasped that my marketing concept that I’m launching as a case study in about 10 days is really good.

New cars- new shoes- new clothing lines- new art- new sports drink- new perfume

All of those things involve heavy marketing, constant branding and cost effective competitive pricing that will endure the cliche selling word of “NEW!” or “New AND IMPROVED!”.  My case study into our .au positioning in the market place is going to take place on eBay.com.au.  As silly as it sounds, whilst you can have a look for yourself now at the 30 some odd .au domains for sale with ridiculous asking prices, I’m going to be asking close to some of the more reasonably ridiculous prices on a few of our names… but also with very good reasons.

Those reasons are prior TLD sales in the market place.  Why not offer the World end user or company, the domainer that’s savvy and believes in the .au or a website development company that wants to increase their brand by owning an already proven valuable domain?  Exactly… why not.

I’ll go ahead and place my marketing tease here:

According to the fabulous bloke over at www.DNJournal.com Ron Jackson, wifelover.com sold for $100,930.00 USD.  What is wifelover.com.au and wifelover.net.au going to fetch as a single package?  We’ll soon find out whether or not the .au can bring only 10% of the .com value if both .au extensions are sold together.  Most certainly the .net.au would be worth a mere 1% of the reigning supreme .com eh?

This liquidation of 100 .com.au and .net.au domain names in the form of a case study is going to accomplish 3 things I hope. 

1. Create awareness that there are people and companies here in Australia that are in the domaining industry that want to grow and are sincere in trying to assess the value of our TLD in the Global market place.

2. Create a nice early stage of branding for Pacific Octane Pty Ltd in regard to the services that we will be providing very soon such as domain leasing options, viral marketing campaigns, development and logo design on www.PacificOctane.com.au to the World and especially domainers interested in the .au market.

3. Make some damn money!  This is the BEST reason I can think of to do this case study.

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I’ll be publishing our auction links onto www.PacificOctane.com very soon.  The auctions will begin on THURSDAY JULY 24th at 8:00am sharp.  For the pommies, frenchies and yanks- check your clocks and adjust your times accordingly ; )  LOL *coming from a “yank” that’s pretty funny and I’ve got a huge nose!

James Wester