The biggest auction of the day today was the PirateBay.org auction on DropCatch.com. PirateBay.org expired and went into deleted status, where it was caught by DropCatch. The domain name sold at auction for $50,000 today. I was not following the auction closely, so I do not know how many bidders participated in the auction.
When I was looking at my Dropping.pro emails this morning, I noticed quite a few domain names in pending delete status beginning with “GE.” A few Whois searches showed me that the domain names were previously owned by General Electric, which is commonly referred to as GE. The domain names I noticed were registered at CSC, and once they were allowed to expire, they went into pending delete status, where they will be caught by drop catching services.
Here is an assortment of the GE domain names that were in pending delete status today that could have TM issues if used in an infringing manner:
For the first time I can recall, there was a .IO domain name in auction at Park.IO that I was interested enough in buying that I was willing to pay 4 figures to buy it. The auction ended on Sunday, and I was a loser, despite bidding more than $1,000 for the domain name.
I shared this on Twitter, as I think it is important to show people I am not solely interested in buying .com domain names:
Thought I was going to win my first .IO domain name in auction yesterday at @io_domains. I bid over $1k but lost. Maybe next time.
— Elliot Silver (@DInvesting) August 31, 2020
One of the best sources of domain name inventory for my portfolio is expiry auctions. I spend a fair amount of my time analyzing and bidding on domain names at GoDaddy Auctions, NameJet, and DropCatch.com. I have also bid on a couple of domain names at Park.io and Dynadot, although I have not yet won an auction on either of those platforms.
I think everyone has their own ways to analyze expiry and deleted domain names that are in auction, and I thought I would share a few ways I find them:
In 2017, DropCatch.com began allowing domain investors to sell their domain names via the platform. You can now see two types of auction on DropCatch – “Dropped,” which are domain names that expired and were deleted, and “Private Seller,” which are privately owned domain names that were put into auction by the domain registrant.
In approximately one week, a change is coming to DropCatch that will impact private sellers. The change was shared with me by Abdu Tarabichi, who noticed the following message when he attempted to list domain names for auction:
The expiry auction for Fanbase.com ended today at GoDaddy Auctions, and the domain name sold for $151,000. There were 229 bids placed from 29 bidders in the three day expiry auction.
The sale of Fanbase.com is the largest expiry auction at GoDaddy Auctions that I can recall. In looking at NameBio, the next three highest value expiry auctions at GoDaddy in the last 5 years include:
