While the whole thing usually seem to surround the auctions, I don’t think they are lacking in quality of names, yet the pricing. Most attenders are domainers who want to buy at wholesale prices or slightly above wholesale. No one really wants to buy end user pricing unless there is a business model behind it to support its ROI.

I am not a fan of these events either. I am by trade a developer and end-user, and have only made about a quarter million selling urls, so I don’t count as a big-fish.

And frankly, as a developer, I am not going to be letting go of any more of my “category killer” domains. But that was not always the case.

I was once given free tickets to the geo domains conference. I turned them down. As a condition of taking them, I was required to make hotel reservations through the giver’s hotel affiliate link. At the Ritz. Hotels offer a simple service for the money they are paid, ego petting and overpaying are not one of them. No thanks.

These circuses are also where a few are able to manipulate markets for their own ends. Remember when you were told that a domain name did not matter? Even recently there have been insinuations that Geo domains will shortly lose value? How about the great IDNS stampede (which never happened)?

You think that’s air you’re breathing, Neo?

Domain conferences are huge drunken snake oil and rumor bazaars and time spent at one of these is time that should have been spent doing actual work.