This morning, I was looking through some drops on Snapnames for the next couple of days. I was researching one of the names I thought was worth bidding on, and I saw that it was an expired domain name rather than a private seller’s auction. After some further research (including a Whois History search), I saw that it was owned by a company whose name I’ve seen on a number of previous Whois searches, and the company owns thousands of domain names.
When companies begin dropping domain names from their portfolio, it usually means one of a couple of things. The first (and usually most likely) is that they didn’t think the name was valuable. For some reason, they decided that this particular domain name isn’t worth $8/year to renew. There are plenty of names I have dropped because I didn’t sell them and I didn’t want to throw good money after bad.
The second potential cause is that the company is facing financial troubles, and they need to lower their overhead. Not renewing domain names is a way to reduce overhead, although it’s probably not the smartest way to do so, as this would bring no revenue to the company. However, if a company is dropping thousands of domain names, it might not be worth searching through huge lists to find one or two worth keeping.
Since the name has at least 2 bidders now, I don’t think the first scenario is likely. With that said, I am going to reach out to the company in private and see if I can buy some of their domain names. If they are facing a cash crunch, perhaps we can work out a deal for other names I’ve looked at in the past. They could get the much needed liquidity, and I could get some strong names at good prices.