Domain Auctions

Every morning, regardless of where I am or what I have planned for the day, I spend an hour or so looking through lists of expired domain names that are either scheduled to be auctioned or pending delete. I use several different tools to analyze names, including Dropping.pro, ExpiredDomains.net, and personally curated lists using auction platform-provided search tools.

From these lists and tools, I hone in on a small group of domain names I want to buy. Some already have many bids and others have not received any bids that I can see. Using DropCatch and NameJet for pending delete domain names, I place backorders based on my risk tolerance. If I really want a particular name, I place a $79 bid at NameJet and a $59 bid on DropCatch and let them fight it out. For names I am less certain about, I use the Discount Club at DropCatch.

Shortly after publishing my article about the Medal.com auction on DropCatch.com that ended at $185,728, I saw that my Twitter account had a new follower: Pim de Witte, CEO of Medal. Medal is a platform that allows gamers to record, edit, and share gaming clips and videos. The company uses the Medal.tv domain name for its website. I immediately thought the company was the likely buyer of the domain name.

I reached out to Pim to ask if his company acquired Medal.com at auction, and he confirmed that his company was the winning bidder in the auction.

I asked Pim if he could comment about the acquisition, and here’s what he told me:

Blue chip domain names like Medal.com don’t hit the auction block very often. As I shared on Twitter last weekend, a company called Ciox Health acquired Medal, Inc., which owned the Medal.com domain name. For an unknown reason, the domain name expired. Likely because the name was registered at Gandi, it was deleted rather than auctioned by a partner auction platform.

The beneficiary of this deleted domain name was DropCatch.com, which caught the domain name after it fully deleted. Following a heated auction, the Medal.com domain name sold today for $185,728. Michael Law shared a screenshot of the final auction result: