ShellOil.com Expiry Weirdness

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When I was looking through my Dropping.com email yesterday, I saw that ShellOil.com was coming up for expiry auction at NameJet. I did a historical Whois search at DomainTools, and I saw the domain name had been owned by Shell International Petroleum Company before it expired. The domain name was created back in 1997, and it looks like the company has owned it for many years.

I tweeted about the expiration, mentioning the Shell global and Shell US Twitter accounts:

Someone replied that perhaps the company was moving away from the “oil” branding and that may be a reason for the expiration. I replied that

Emoji Auction on NameJet

When I was taking care of my backorders on NameJet last night, I noticed a banner for an Emoji domain name auction. It looks like there are somewhere around 150+/- Emoji .WS domain names coming up for auction between 5 days and three weeks from now.

So far, it looks like there are quite a few bids for the upcoming auctions. Many of the domain names with bids also have reserve prices that have not yet been met. It looks like 13 of the auctions with bids do not have a reserve price and will sell (assuming the high bidder continues through to the auction).

Emoji domain names seem to be somewhat popular, at least amongst domain investors. Back in September, I reported that the ☯.com domain name (yin yang Emoji) was sold for $11,201. Vice News recently had a news segment with Page Howe covering Emoji domain names as well. Aside from

NamesCon 2018 Auctions Up on NameJet

The NameJet live and silent domain name auctions are starting to take shape on NameJet. If you visit NameJet from now until the end of February (give or take), you can see the “NamesCon” link in the top menu. Clicking that will take you to the current list of domain names that have been entered into the auction.

At this point, it is unclear what domain names will be included in the live auction and what domain names will only be in the silent auction, but it is probably fairly clear which domain names are the best of the bunch right now. Knowing how this works, I am pretty sure this is only a preliminary list, and more domain names will be added to the auction as we get closer.

In my opinion, 10 of the best names include the following domain names, as of the time of publication:

NameJet Now Tells You if Auctions Are Expiry or Private Lister

NameJet made a step towards more transparency in the last day or so when it introduced a new field on auctions called “Domain Type.” From what I can see, there appear to be three options: Expiry, Direct Lister, and Pending Delete. These fields are visible when an auction is in pre-release status as well as when an auction is live.

I think this is helpful and makes auctions more transparent. Before NameJet added this field, bidders would only know if an auction was via direct lister if the auction was public, if it had a reserve price, or by performing a Whois search and possibly using the Whois history tool at DomainTools. This will make it more clear from the outset.

I have been bidding much less on

NameJet Addresses Missing Public Auction History

Someone included me in a tweet me this morning mentioning that some closed auctions were missing their bid history at NameJet. This missing data was also discussed in a NamePros thread this morning as well, so the issue was not isolated to one account. I went into my Auctions Report tab at NameJet, and I confirmed that the bid history for some of my auctions was missing. For example, when I clicked on the auction report for a closed public auction I had back ordered I saw the following:

I reached out to NameJet GM Jonathan Tenenbaum to see what was happening, and he followed up

NamesCon Auction Details and Submission Info

With the NamesCon 2018 conference a few months away, the domain name auction is starting to take shape. Monte Cahn from Right of the Dot is helping to organize the auction event, and he shared some details about the auction as well as some information about submitting domain names to be sold via auction.

Monte shared these details about the types of domain names that are being sought out for the auction:

“I am looking for the best super premium .com names – meaning key words, dictionary terms in proper tense, N, NN, NNN, L, LL, LLL, etc. These will be at no and low reserve to drive as much bidding competition and bidding excitement as possible.

Although there will be some new TLDs, we will not get most of those from submitters, some will come from the registries and some from registrants but we will not allow any names with premium priced renewals or crazy tiered pricing, etc. But point is, that I am not looking for new TLDs from registrants yet for the auction – just super premium .com names for now.”

The auction will be run using NameJet, and the live auction will be held on