Grabbing an expirerd domain
Mike Davidson has a good article written in 2005 that is still current, to quote:
There are three services — Snapnames.com, Enom.com, and Pool.com
— all operate in a similar manner. They use a network of registrars to
hit the Verisign servers at frequent intervals (but not too frequent to
get banned) and snatch as many requested names as possible. If you
don’t get your name, you don’t pay. But that’s where the three services
begin to differ.
Snapnames.com
Snapnames.com (the exclusive partner of Network Solutions) charges
you $60 for your domain unless there are multiple suitors, at which
point there is an open bid auction between suitors. Seems fair enough.
Snapnames is a bit of a newcomer to the game, but with their Network
Solutions affiliation, they are said to be improving their success
rates.
Enom.com
Not wanting to chance it with only one company, I also enlisted Enom
to snatch my domain for me. Enom had reportedly been improving their “Club Drop?
service for a year or two and it was now considered one of the top
three. Their fee was only $30 and they are based in my ‘hood (Seattle),
so I was hoping they would be the company to successfully “work The
Drop? for me.
Here’s where it starts to get sketchy though.
Enom claims that the higher your bid is (beyond the $30), the more
“resources? they will dedicate to grabbing the domain. What the hell?
How am I supposed to judge that? Does that mean you’re using one server
now and will use 30 servers if I bid $40? Or does it mean that you’re
using 30 now and will use 35 if I bid $1000?
Not knowing exactly what to do, I attempted to bid a couple of
hundred dollars during the last day, but Enom required me to send them
a fax to become a “verified bidder?. Since I was at home that day and
only dinosaurs still have fax machines, I was unable to increase my
bid. Oh well, I thought, if someone else on Enom bids higher, at least
I’ll be able to participate in the auction.
Pool.com
Pool.com is the Scott Boras
of domain name grabbing — the brilliant, yet conniving agent that
players (domains) love and team owners (prospective domain buyers)
hate. Pool plays off the power of the unknown in such a fiendishly
clever way that you don’t know whether to hug them or kill them. Here’s
how it works:
Pool is the #1 company around as far as number of servers and
success rates go. You place your original bid for $60 and if Pool.com
grabs your name for you, they send you an e-mail telling you they’ve
been successful and that you’ve now entered “Phase 1″ of the two-phase
auction system. This is the case whether or not you are the only
bidder! Pool.com doesn’t even reveal how many bidders there are.
Then, in a Boras-like move of diabolical genius, Pool.com informs
you that you have three days to place a new sealed bid. If the bid is
either one of the top two bids or within 30% of the top bid, you move
on to a one-day open bid auction (the “challenger? auction) for final
control of the domain.
Grrrrreat.
So if I bid $100 and two people bid $140, I don’t even get to move
on to the final auction! It’s all designed to get me to up my sealed
bid… whether or not there are even any other bidders.
Note: One other thing I forgot to mention is that before the
name dropped, I grabbed all .net, .org, and .info variants (all were
available) in order to have more leverage over other buyers.
