Can someone CHEAT Flippa ?

If you go to the domain, you'll see that it's still for sale on Flippa. There has been a few instances where the purchaser of the auction buys the domain, gets the product but never ends up paying. I'm not sure why someone would've purchased that domain for 20K IF in fact it was real.

This is food for thought.
I went to the domain that you mentioned and noticed that there is no content on it.

I did a search for "Sarah Palin" in Google and could only see 2 adword ads.
Did a search for "Obama" and could not see a single adwords ad.

So, lets say that you do a site using some political figure's name, and there is no adword ads, how do you hope to monetize it?

On the other hand, if you do not to want to sell it, why bother going to Flippa and advertise it?

If I was the owner of such a domain, I would sell for such a price and not mess around unless I'm running an experiment as you mentioned.

In that case, it would have been an expensive experiment seeing that you will have to pay Flippa a success fee.

A domain is worth what a buyer will pay. "why" a buyer will pay is what you need to figure out BEFORE you register domains with the "hope" to sell. No one pays $20K for anything with out a plan for it.

Over and over people look at imaginary numbers. In REAL Marketing you have to provide value to the buyer. The BUYER BUYER BUYER is what matters.

Thank you all for your reply

GreatWebSuccess - that auction closed and there is a thank you note for the winner for 20k. I know that this value is over the edge, that's why I ask if this can be manipulated somehow.

Use flippa+sarahpalin4presidentnow.com to get the auction showing up in Google. Highest bid 20k, and - Thanks To The Winner. Was about 3 weeks ago.

Kahl - Sarah Palin is at the moment not used as AdWords keyword, but if you go to Google Keyword Tool you can see that those keywords get right now, in 2010, awesome traffic. Here only the top 10 I pulled with wordtracker - DAILY TRAFFIC
1 sarah palin 7,227
2 sarah palin hot 1,757
3 sarah palin fake 1,444
4 sarah palin bikini 1,263
5 lisa ann sarah palin 797
6 sarah palin divorce 471
7 sarah palin bikini video 413
8 sarah palin book tour 367
9 sarah palin photos 322
10 sarah palin naked 321

Imagine next year or in early 2012 !!!

I agree that you have to have some creativity to use those keywords, but as basically nobody is optimizing for those you get easy a first page rank with a few anchor text links.

And traffic is value, to be monetized over several sources like AdSense, Amazon (check out Sarah Palin, lot's to offer), Banner ads etc.

And I WILL SELL my domain, I need some seed money for a new project.

Exactly what I was asking for, thanks.

I can only imagine that someone is behind this to maybe redirect ALL Sarah Palin domains to ONE. Could be. Or monetize on all and crosslink them to dominate each SP search term.

Or as I asked, maybe the SELLER had some trick to made someone bid those 20k but in fact they never closed the deal.

G.

I noticed this domain sold too. I was wondering the same thing. Either the person who bought it is an idiot or there is something fishy going on there.

I can't image why/how it could be manipulated since they would have to pay the Flippa auction fee. In this case the fee on $20k would be $500.

I highly doubt this domain sold. A Flippa auction can end without the success fee paid (the user will get into trouble with them) or he could have just paid $100 one time to avoid paying the 5%.

The buyer has no feedback for a succesful transaction either.

By all means go wild on trying to monetize Sarah Palin and related keywords but don't let a sale that probably didn't happen (or one that if it did happen was bought by a moron) dictate what you do.

this is an outright scam, both the person who sell it and but it

you know what ? if you go to ebay, there are lots of sites listing for a thousand times of what it's worth. i don't know any of them ever been sold or not though

I have no idea if this particular domain auction was a scam.

HOWEVER, in general...

I've seen people create fake auctions and use their friends to drive up the bid price of a domain or website to crazy levels. Later on, the person comes out with a "domain flipping" or "website flipping" product. Naturally, the seller points to these auctions as "proof" of his expertise and income.

Cheers,
Becky

A lot of auctions end with a winning bid, but the buyer doesn't pay so they get banned and the auction relisted.

As for the auction being a scam, it would only be a scam if they didn't deliver the domain when paid for. Anyone who buys it at that price should check into a mental facility, but it's not a scam.

Sarah Palin was probably the winning bidder.

Then she forgot how to turn her computer back on