The Alliance of American Football (AAF) was a professional football league that played part of a football season in 2019. According to Sports Illustrated, AAF filed for bankruptcy in 2019. The league used the valuable AAF.com domain name for its website while it was operational and for sometime after its bankruptcy. Whois records now show that AAF.com expired, and the domain name is now in pending delete status.
Here’s a screenshot of the current Whois record, courtesy of DomainTools:
About a year and a half ago, I sold a domain name that was quite replicable. I don’t want to give away details about the domain name I sold, but it was the type of domain name where I could change keywords and similar types of names would also hold value. I wanted to buy similar domain names, but they’re all owned already.
One issue I faced is that these domain names were valuable to end user buyers in the mid 4 to possibly low 5 figure range, but they don’t exactly hold a ton of liquid value. It wouldn’t make much sense for me to reach out to the registrants to try and buy them because I would need to spend in the low to mid 3 figures for them on the buy side, and not too many domain registrants are willing to sell in that range when emailed out of the blue.
I spend quite a bit of time on NameJet searching for upcoming domain name auctions and participating in auctions. Overall, I have a pretty decent experience using the platform, save for the occasional delayed delivery or non-delivery of domain names. There was also the time NameJet was auctioning a domain name I owned without my permission, but that was apparently an issue of human error.
Yesterday evening, I noticed that Shawnee.com is listed as an upcoming “Expiry” auction on NameJet. When I did a bit of pre-auction research, it seemed peculiar that this domain name would be listed for an upcoming auction, and I posted about it on Twitter:
I want to share a bit of a weird story. Yesterday afternoon, I received an Auction Start email for a domain name I had backordered at NameJet. When I saw that I was the High Bidder, I was surprised because I am pretty sure I placed this backorder after seeing it had already received at least one other bid. I was expecting to be an underbidder, giving me additional time to decide whether to bid further. This happens, and bidders should always be prepared to be the high bidder.
When I visited the auction page, I saw that it was a “Direct Lister” auction, meaning that it was privately listed for auction and was not an expiry auction. I was curious to see who listed this domain name for sale, so I did a Whois search. Much to my surprise, my company is the registrant of the domain name, which was created at the end of September.
The domain name belonging to former New Jersey Governor and once US Presidential candidate Chris Christie has expired at Register.com. If the domain name is not renewed within the next several hours, it will be beyond recovery. At that point, the domain name will be auctioned at NameJet and Snapnames for three days, and it will sell to the highest bidder.
I’ve been investing in domain names as a full time career since late 2007. I have bought my fair share of solid domain names, and I have also missed out on some good deals. Some seemed overpriced at the time, but looking back on things now, I wish I had pulled the trigger.
One strategy I try to employ is that I would rather pay a bit more than I think a domain name is worth wholesale rather than risk losing it to a colleague or competitor. If a domain name has such strong resale potential, the few hundred or few thousand dollars more it takes to buy it should not be an obstacle. In practice, it is very hard to do this without spending far too much money because it can be tough to determine where to draw the line.
Andy Booth started a Twitter thread asking people to list the one name that got away. Mine would probably be Values.com, which I previously wrote about Here’s Andy’s thread:
