About 2 years back, my initial entry point into this domaining game stemmed from the expired domain name and drop catching process (or at least what I thought was drop catching).
This Cnet post, and Mike Davidson’s article, were two of the original I read, and heavily concentrated on the drop process. And I’ll say it again, what appeared to be the drop process.
Coming on my second year of domaining, and acquiring domains at Snapnames, Pool, and the like, you wanna know a confusing little secret of the domaining business?
Domains really don’t “drop” anymore. Good ones at least. Any domain that’s worth a darn is simply auctioned by the existing domain registrar partner during the Auto Renew Grace Period. Alot of people think Snapnames/Pool/Club Drop are “pounding the registries” to acquire these domains. In what I’ve found out, they aren’t. They don’t have to. They control the domains (ie. have contracts with the registrars), so before they truly expire, they pimp them out in their own auction. Mike Davidson was simply within Pool when he acquired Newsvine. The name never really dropped. Pool simply had a contract with the original registrar to auction the domain for them..
“Well, if they don’t sell at auction, then they’ll drop and I can grab them…”
not really..
If domains fail to sell at auction, and make more than $6-$8/year each from parked PPC revenue, the domain registrar usually keeps them, and throws it into their own domain stash. (That’s why you usually see a PPC parked page for a domain prior to auction for about 30 days - so the registar can make monthly assumptions for PPC revenue…)
All the remaining domains that don’t sell at auction, and aren’t kept by the domain registrar, drop.
now, find a way to monetize *those* domains, and I’ll send you a box of cigars.
(Daily Domainer wrote up a great piece related to this subject - you can find it, and some pretty graphs and images, here)
This entry was posted on Thursday, August 2nd, 2007 at 4:34 pm and is filed under Domaining. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
