A few days ago we posted about SnapNames.com Flash auction of over 600 domain names “recently registered by SnapNames due to their high VeriSign Data Analyzer Traffic Score and Generic Word strength!”
Today, courtesy of a reader, it appears that many of the unsold domains from this auction have now been deleted and are available again for registration.
As we noted in our original post the domains in the auction were registered on June 1st.
As of publication here are just a few of the domains that were in this auction that are now available for hand registration:
blackfoto.com
blackmailorder.com
bluefaq.com
bluenoel.com
bluetaste.com
dentonhealthcare.com
echocottage.com
monsterweapons.com
fortunefrog.com
gotoanguilla.com
helloalgeria.com
hitechspot.com
honolulugolfcourses.com
insideresort.com
interestcarloan.com
ipoone.com
ipsrc.com
ishmo.com
isomalia.com
issix.com
isthree.com
ivytax.com
jobssenegal.com
kalamazooyouthsoccer.com
kidbelt.com
kinads.com
lansingmortgages.com
lawhalf.com
likerev.com
linuxand.com
lowestnews.com
So it appears that a lot if not all of the unsold this auction were deleted by the registrars that registered the domains.
This of course was called domain tasting back in the day.
While some thing domain tasting is no longer possible that isn’t the case.
What changed was an increase of fees and the number of give back registrations allowed per registrar, making the registration of tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of registrations a day with a 2% retention rate not economically feasible.
Add into the fact that many different registrar tags with Snapnames affiliation were used to register the domain and the a portion of these domains for $69 or more than that will more than cover the costs of the domains that don’t sell.
In the aftermath it seems that this auction was a experiment in domain tasting 2.0
I passed on way better names in expired auction. These are pigeonshit.
Seems like they were just trying to unload a bunch of garbage.
Brad
Sleazy oversee at it again. Looking for the suckers AGAIN. They’re losing street cred by the day
Totally BS!!!
The numbers on the IPS report are pretty bizarre. Take the IPS report, sort by traffic score descending, and check Alexa/Compete…. most of the time the domains at the top won’t even have a Compete profile or Alexa rank despite having traffic scores of 20,000 – 90,000 (usually about 98% of domains dropping in a day have a traffic score under 1k to put it in perspective).
My guess is that Snap (which currently tries to grab all LLLL.com – among other things – regardless of customer bids) was trying to come up with a threshold for automatically grabbing domains based on traffic score, and that we won’t see this happen again now that they have some real data.
Do you know how many sold in the auction? It seems pretty sleazy to me to auction fresh regs and delete the ones that no suckers were willing to buy.
Michael
Last I saw 23 domains had bids but I have no idea of how many sold
Wow… 23… maybe we will see this more often. Even if they were over the 10% limit on all their partner registrars and had to pay the full $0.20 on the 577 domains that didn’t sell, they still walked away with $1,471.60 after the $115.40 in AGP deletion fees (assuming the worst that all 23 domains only had one $69 bid and they had to pay the fee on all the deleted ones).
Nothing to sneeze at for something that can be 100% automated with software if they can replicate those results on a regular basis.
Interesting.
What would be the point of a multi-million dollar company doing this? Is it “amateur hour” over there every week now?
These domains are worth nothing. You can’t build anything on them and the traffic is not type in.
Really, is the business strategy to make pennies off of non-informed domain buyers here?
Wow! People already have little to no respect for Domaining as a true business, outside of those who are actually involved, and then they wanta pull a bogus move like this? Distasteful!
“While some thing domain tasting is no longer possible that isn’t the case.
What changed was an increase of fees and the number of give back registrations allowed per registrar, making the registration of tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of registrations a day with a 2% retention rate not economically feasible.”
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Oh, I thought you said in the other post that tasting is no longer possible when you said:
” Remember there is no more tasting so basically if you register a domain that you think has traffic to find out it has none, you own it.”
So basically put, a registrar can still do domain tasting (to an extent) but individuals can no longer do domain tasting.
If that’s the case then it seems as though most of these must have been tasted by snap or their partners .
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“Michael
Last I saw 23 domains had bids but I have no idea of how many sold”
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Not much more by the looks of it, I did see one at $170 when it closed but it didn’t look like any of the others went higher than the initial bid. (at a glance)
they did keep some of the ones they reg’d
ph
The kings of slime at work again. Just a bad bad company. I guess they are searching underneath the couch cushions for spare change now that frank schilling is handing them their lunch.
We know Oversee has automated domain registrations going on ( http://domainnamewire.com/2011/04/18/udrp-panel-questions-oversee-nets-automated-domain-registration-processes/ ) As long as they’d done the work to pick anything worth having, why not offer the ones they were going to delete anyway to the public. A little PR spin and who knows, maybe they find another ‘business model’.