Generic & Keyword Auction – Domains Up To $36.65 A Click!

Just awhile ago I just received an email from the guys at Oversee regarding the Snapnames auction at Domainer Mardi Gras.

At first I thought….I’m already overloaded with conferences and auctions … do I really have the time to look at this? Honestly …. I couldn’t resist sneaking a peak and I’m glad I did. Why? Because these names are actually a lot better than some of the domains put up for auction recently.

Take a look at these .coms:

DatingOnline
DiscountDrugstore
OnlineDiscounts
DomainStats
HomeRefinancing
DownloadSoftware
CleanMyCredit
SpamProof
Lawsuits
ChocolateBars
OrganicFoodStores
ForexInvestments
Manufactures
PokerLessons
PublicGolfCourses
PorterhouseSteaks
Toasts
ActingLessons
SaturdayNight
SilverEarrings
WoodShutters

Not bad eh?

So, let me save you some time right now…. Home Refinancing gets $36.65 a CLICK! HELLO!!!!! Download Software gets $1.11 per click and has a local search volume in the USA of 6,120,000 EXACT matches !! Dating Online is another one at $4.73 a click with 22,200 EXACT matches.

You can bid online for these right now! Best of luck.

Halvarez Registrant Of Parked Domains – Who’s Getting The Ad Revenue?

Given Snapnames opened up their auction history, I decided to login and take a look at some auctions where I’d encountered Halverez – there were quite a few. It was like a trip down memory lane…. I remember back in 2005 when I bid on ….

While plowing through the results, a few things came to mind when I reviewed this auction below:

Question #1

Should people be compensated by Snapnames when they lose the auction to Halverez? In other words, Halverez ends up with the domain name they were bidding on?

Snapnames has stated they ” will offer a rebate, with 5.22% interest” but that’s only to those whose bids were inflated by the fake auction bids.

Question #2

What is Snapnames going to do about domain names that are currently registered to Halverez? The current whois record for this name that I lost at auction, has known contact details for Halverez. The creation date matches up perfectly to the auction date.

Question #3

Who is receiving the revenue from domain names that Halverez “won” at auction? For example, the domain name I lost to Halverez above is currently parked:

Who has been making money from this domain? How many other domains are there like this? In terms of compensation, how do you put a price on lost opportunity cost, revenue from parking/development and revenue from domain sales?

This is starting to take shape now that there appears to be a Class Action Lawsuit filed.

Tell us what you think! Have you have lost to Halverez? What happened?

Snapnames Auction Won/Lost = Monikers Fault ?

Update: Snapnames responded to me overnight stating:

—

Dear Simon,

The registrar was Moniker. They have informed us that they have put a
system in place to prevent this from happening again.

Sincerely,

SnapNames

—

I’d like to keep an eye on this issue. If you find yourself in the same position, with Snapnames or any other backordering company (NameJet / Godaddy) then please let me know or post a comment up here.

In the meantime, who’s really to blame here? Moniker for not passing the name onto Snapnames (I wonder what their contract says) OR Snapnames for not checking that they can auction a domain name?

What do you think?

Think You Won That Snapnames Auction? Think Again!

Yesterday I won a Snapnames auction and paid for the name. 24 hours later I received the following email from Snapnames:

—-

Dear Simon,
I am sorry to have to inform you of this, but there was a mistake in the auction for <SNIP>. The registrar informed us that this name was available for us to send to auction; unfortunately, the name was renewed at the last minute and we were not informed in time to stop the auction. We apologize for this inconvenience. It is a rare occurrence but it unavoidably happens from time to time. Of course, a refund has been issued to you for the $<SNIP> that you paid for the name.

If you have any questions, please let us know.

—-

Snapnames – the obvious questions are:

1. Who was the registrar?
2. What process have you and the registrar put in place to prevent this happening to other people?

Has this happened to you at Snapnames or anywhere else? Feel free to post and let me know.

Oversee Cuts 10% Of Workforce

There have been some rumblings around the place regarding this matter, so I decided to contact Oversee directly. Here is the deal:

On the 15th of August, Oversee.Net told its staff that 10% would be cut across the board. It’s expected that up to 30 staff in total will go from middle level management downwards, across DomainSponsor, SnapNames and Moniker.

While general economic weakness has been cited as reasons for the cut – as an entrepreneur I can see that you need to shuffle the decks, especially post any merger of companies. So to me, this is just business as usual.

Once all the dust settles (especially around Snapnames), it would be good to see things getting back to normal.

Snapnames Might Be Up In 18 Hours

I received the email below from Snapnames at 4am. It seems that Snapnames have employed somebody with some basic writing skills as this is slightly more reassuring. However I wouldn’t have explicitly said “It’s very important to us to maintain that confidence in our service and our team” . For one, the sentence doesn’t read very well and secondly, that should be the objective of the email, not something that is explicitly stated.

It’s interesting to note that Snapnames also stated that they are working “with the vendor to correct the issue”. This makes me think that it could be something like a database back end or perhaps some sort of processing that has gone belly up – although I’d just be speculating. Here is the email:

—–

Dear SnapNames Customers:

The SnapNames Team

—–

Let’s see what tomorrow brings!

Snapnames New Offline Business Model

Snapnames is unavailable AGAIN! Over the past few weeks the site has been up and down like Donkey Kong.

As I type this post, the SnapNames website reads:

“We do not currently have an estimated up time. We will try to update you as we know more. It is probable that auctions scheduled to close Sunday will be moved to Monday. Check the site at 10am PDT Sunday for confirmation of that delay. We’re sorry for this inconvenience.”

You don’t exactly give your customers a level of comfort by using the word “probable“. Perhaps your PR / Corporate Communications people should come up with a nice spiel for your web page when everything breaks.

It’s also interesting to note, that this time last week your website was also down.

Snapnames, what’s the deal? Isn’t it about time you provided an explanation for all this downtime?

When Is A Drop, Not A Drop?

The answer: Whenever the registrar says its not! A couple of really interesting things happened over this past week.

1. The General Manager of the Tucows Domain Portfolio (Bill Sweetman) allegedly said “not all of the expired names end up in the Tucows auction. Some names are renewed by the original registrant before they reach the auction, and some of the names are retained by Tucows for our own portfolio.” I’ll discuss more on this Tucows issue later.

2. I missed out on two names at a Snapnames auction. No – This time it was not halvarez or anyone else; in fact, it didn’t get to auction.

The first name was really good. I was watching it like a hawk and I thought I’d get this without any competition. It was coming from a Snapnames “Priority Partner”, so I knew it was not going anywhere else….. or was it?

The day it was supposed to drop the status was changed to “Backorder” and the expiry went to 2009. Yep, something was not right. I asked Snapnames what happened. They told me that that the owner renewed it the day before the name was due to be released to Snapnames. I did my own checking around and found that to be the case. Content similar to the previous site was back online under the previous owners name.

Well… I thought that I still had a fair few names on backorder…. then BANG, it happened AGAIN! (Or at least I thought it did.) The domain status was changes to “Backorder”. I checked the domain name and this time, it was parked. The old site was gone, there were two pop-unders and the site didn’t look all that appealing. The domain is currently sitting at the Afforda.com registry. When I visit their website and do a whois, I get “Request time out. Please try again.” Lovely!

After waiting a few days to hear back from Snapnames, it turns out that the 2nd domain wasn’t from their Pending Delete queue and Snap didn’t actually get it in the first instance.