5 Million+ Page Views for an Expiring Domain Name?

I was looking through GoDaddy Auctions this morning when I came across a domain name with estimated traffic statistics that stood out to me. According to the GoDaddy Auctions listing, SabaMovie.com reportedly has 5,068,713 “Estimated monthly pageviews.” The “Estimated monthly revenue” is listed at $4.00 USD. There have been over 600 visits to the auction listing, and it has a high bid of $510.

I believe the traffic statistic is calculated by GoDaddy based on the number of visits to the domain name landing page during the relatively short period the domain name is on GoDaddy’s name servers during expiry. The listing states, “Note: Pageviews and revenues are based on data collected over a 45-day period.” I am not entirely sure how the estimated monthly revenue figure is calculated. When I typed in SabaMovie.com just now, the domain name does not even resolve, so it’s even more peculiar that the traffic report is so high.

I looked at Archive.org to see what existed on the domain name before it expired, and it looks like there was a website in Arabic. There seem to be quite a few meanings in Arabic for the word “saba,” although I can’t tell what the website topic was before expiry.

Since PPC monetization is not really an area of focus for my business, I don’t typically pay much attention to the reported traffic statistics shared by GoDaddy Auctions. Put simply, I don’t know how accurate (or inaccurate) the traffic stats usually are on auctions.

Whenever reviewing stats for an expired domain name like this, I think there is a big dose of caveat emptor – buyer beware. There are no guarantees about the accuracy of traffic figures, and there certainly aren’t any details about the source of any traffic.

If there is considerable traffic for that domain name, it’s interesting that it was allowed to expire.