Domain Auctions

Mondelez International, Inc. is a massive publicly traded company (MLDZ on Nasdaq). The company owns a variety of brands such as Cadbury, Nabisco, Halls, Trident, and many other popular food and beverage brands. Mondelez has a market capitalization of around $88 billion.

On the homepage of NameJet under the top dropping domain names section, KJS.com is listed at the top. On the page promoting the upcoming auction, the listing type is Pending Delete. Whois records at DomainTools show that the domain name expired on May 23, 2021, and it is in pending delete status:

Many people use the automated appraisals shown on domain name auction websites as a form of valuation. I don’t always agree with the valuations shown, and I think these tools can be far off in their valuations. You may disagree with me about whether or not auction participants use these appraisals, but I think it’s pretty clear they have an effect on bidding when considering how auctions have changed since GoDaddy and NameJet appended valuations to auction listings.

There is some nuance to using the appraised values though. As I previously shared, a domain name will typically have a higher appraised value when there are multiple extensions registered for that keyword. This appraisal figure may be misleading if the original registrant that let the domain name expire had also registered additional domain names in other extensions. The appraised value may be artificially inflated as a result of the algorithm detecting other registrations.

eShop.com is currently in auction at NameJet and SnapNames. I think it has the potential to be one of the largest Pending Delete auctions on the Web.com-owned platforms in quite some time.

Prior to its deletion, eShop.com was most recently owned by Microsoft. Archive.org shows the domain name has not been used by Microsoft since 2010 when it was part of MSN Shopping. eShop.com had been created in 1994, and the domain name expired in January of 2021. Because it was not renewed at Com Laude, it went through the entire deletion cycle. The domain name was caught by a Web.com registrar, and it is in auction at NameJet and SnapNames. The new creation date for eShop.com is March 27, 2021.