Domain Auctions

I was attempting to log in to my account at DropCatch.com this afternoon when I encountered some difficulty. A couple of times I saw a system maintenance landing page which prevented me from doing anything on the website. A few additional refreshes later, and I was able to access the login screen but unable to login. Instead, I saw the error message, “Sorry, we cannot log you in at this time.”

I reached out to DropCatch.com to ensure the company was aware of the problem – and also to double check that it wasn’t isolated to my account or a subset of accounts. I was told the company is aware of the issue and working on resolving it. I was also told the website should be back up and operational soon.

There are quite a few domain name auctions ending soon, and it would be a shame if the update isn’t made before the auctions end for the day. I hope the Drop Catch team is able to Push It soon.

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.