One of the biggest auctions on the board today was Maximal.com. The domain name expired, was deleted, and it was caught by DropCatch.com. Maximal.com sold for $20,150.
Prior to expiring, Maximal.com had been owned by EMC Corporation, which is part of Dell. Because the domain name was registered at CSC, a company that offers corporate domain name registration services, it went into pending delete status after expiring.
Most domain registrars have deals with expiry auction platforms. Expired domain names are auctioned at a partner auction platform, and the registrar takes a cut of the sale price. If the registrar owns the auction platform, it takes all of the auction proceeds.
In the case of CSC, domain names owned by its clients that are allowed to expire go through the full deletion cycle. Drop catching services, like DropCatch.com, compete to catch these deleted domain names and then auction them to the highest bidder. CSC doesn’t take any profit when a CSC-registered domain name deletes.
While $20,150 is a drop in the bucket for a massive company like EMC Dell, it seems silly and wasteful to simply let a domain name like Maximal.com expire. Instead, Dell could have asked CSC to broker the sale of this domain name, allowing Dell to cash in on the asset. With CSC’s expertise coupled with EMC Dell’s long window to sell an asset like this, they could have achieved an optimal retail sale price rather than the domain name selling for a wholesale price.
At the end of the day, this is meaningless for a large company like Dell, but it is still surprising to see when they could have monetized the domain name.
$20,000… eh, just leave it for the cleaning lady.