DropCatch.com will be undergoing some maintenance later on today. As a result, auctions that were expected to conclude today during this time period will end on Tuesday instead. The note on the top of the website provides the update:
“DropCatch will be undergoing routine maintenance on Monday, January 8th between 2:00PM and 6:00PM Mountain Time. The site will be unavailable during this time. Auctions scheduled to end on Monday will be extended until Tuesday, January 9th.”
Overall, I like bidding on pending delete auctions at DropCatch.com. I can pay for a domain name instantly after the auction concludes, and within moments, the domain name is provisioned to my NameBright account. The platform is generally user-friendly, and I like bidding there. There is one issue though.
Every time I login to my DropCatch account, it prompts me for a 2FA code. This would be okay if it was once in a while or even once per day. However, this isn’t the case. If I backorder a domain name, step away from my computer for a little while, I am almost always prompted for a 2FA login after returning to place subsequent bids. With my auction routine, I could be prompted for 2FA logins several times in a morning. I don’t mind 2FA, but I would prefer to be prompted once a day, at most.
I find this persistent 2FA login requirement to be a nuisance.
The monthly .AI expiry auction operated by the .AI registry ended yesterday. The top performing auction was Vision.ai, which sold for $100,000. There were 112 bids in the auction. In looking at the registry’s auction platform’s past sales, it looks like this is the largest .AI expiry auction, as well as its first 6 figure sale.
I was not following the auctions as they closed, but Steve Webb shared a screenshot of the final bid amount:
Over the weekend, I noticed the Micro.CO domain name was forwarding to Micro.Company. In the normal course of web browsing, this wouldn’t be surprising, but given the context, it surprised me. GoDaddy Auctions had announced that Micro.CO was included in its NameFind private auctions closing on December 15th:
Looks like https://t.co/ePiQKJvhDN was acquired by @microdotcompany. Interesting that the auction at @godaddyauctions ended yesterday and they're already forwarding the domain name. The name I won (https://t.co/4emG3LaPTX) hasn't been provisioned to me yet. https://t.co/FV8TYTi0iZ
— Elliot Silver (@DInvesting) December 16, 2023
How the heck did the winning bidder manage to secure the domain name in such a short period of time? It generally takes many days for GoDaddy to provision domain names won via GoDaddy Auctions. In addition, I had won a domain name on December 15th, and it was not delivered to my GoDaddy account.
In a tweet this afternoon, GoDaddy announced that it will be auctioning some short domain names from its NameFind portfolio. These domain names will be auctioned in 7 day auctions without reserve prices on GoDaddy Auctions. These are private seller domain names rather than expiry domain names:
To celebrate the upcoming end of GoDaddy Auctions’ Beta phase, we’re adding some top-notch domains to the platform!
Don’t miss out on Cliche.com, VisitVegas.com, plus tons more, all in no-reserve auctions.
New names added daily!https://t.co/olrNSvSX8o
— GoDaddy Auctions (@godaddyauctions) December 6, 2023
I was looking through the names available to bid on at DropCatch.com when something caught my attention. In addition to seeing the “Dropped” and “Private Seller” types of auctions, there are now “Pre-Release” auctions as well.
A quick investigation showed me the source of these domain names. It would appear that HugeDomains is letting some of its inventory expire, and those expiry domain names are coming up for auction on DropCatch. Both HugeDomains and DropCatch have the same parent company – TurnCommerce.
