Cloud.us gets sold but Go Daddy will see no money

By: RH

Earlier this week we and some other domain blogs wrote about the .us domains dropping at Go Daddy.

There were some really good names and guess what ? A lot of them got renewed and then sold so Go Daddy missed out on a lot of business.

Cloud.us closed at $8505, some thought over priced and some thought great price. What the bidders did not know was that the domain was already be negotiated for sale.

Professional domain investor Brad Mugford of DataCube.com posted this on a thread dedicated to Go Daddy Auctions at Namepros.com

"The domain acquisition started far before the auction process. I noticed it was expiring awhile back and contacted the owner about it and was told it was not for sale.

After the auction the owner told me they were going to renew the domain, and asked me if I was still interested.

I never bid on the actual GD auction.

I think the price agreed to was fair for both parties.

Brad"

We posted over one month ago about why we stopped posting auction results, this week was the illustration of why. Brad was on the opposite end of the table when he won Wrestling.us the same day the Cloud.us auction closed.

Brad posted:

"Well, I won Wrestling.us and it was just renewed.

It appears a forum member acquired that one and several other domains from the same owner.

An entire other batch of domains has been renewed and sold also.

It seems like letting domains expire is just a great way to attract interest.

Brad"

So it looks like many people are using Go Daddy the way we and others like Abdu from Domainsville mentioned.

The auction business gets more competitive every day.

Kudos to Ms.Domainer on Namepros for starting a thread that has morphed into an excellent look inside Go Daddy Auctions.

Comments

[Ron]

The owner would not have sold it less than $8k if not closer to $10K, that is the range I would assume, if he saw it go for $8K in a secondary market auction, he would feel the value would be much more...

[Brad Mugford]

GoDaddy auctions have become the Wild West.

Many people are emailing the original registrant after auctions to try to acquire the better domains.

Not only that, but others are just letting their domains expire to get a real world $80 appraisal.

According to GoDaddy TOS the original registrant technically owns the domain for about (7) days after the auction ends and has the right to renew it.

There are several ways GoDaddy could address this if they wanted.

1.) Do what a registrar like Dynadot does.
When a domain expires the whois publicly shows -

Administrative Contact Name: Pending Renewal or Deletion
Administrative Contact Address1: PO Box 701
Administrative Contact City: San Mateo
Administrative Contact State/Province: CA
Administrative Contact Postal Code: 94401
Administrative Contact Country: United States
Administrative Contact Country Code: US
Administrative Contact Phone Number: +1.6502620100
Administrative Contact Email: expired@dynadot.com

Yes, there is still DomainTools, but the number of people who use that vs public whois is far lower.

2.) Start the auction 7 days later. That way when the auction ends you receive the domain.

There are many other things that could be done as well.

Brad

[RH]

I think you made smart play Brad and best of luck with the domain. You are right about it being the Wild West, but it still does provide some action for those that like that adrenalin rush.

[Brad Mugford]

@ Ron

Many times auctions on competitive venues can yield higher results than an individual can achieve with the same domain.

Brad

[Cloud Domains]

Its a great name and thank you for explaining what happened.

[Andrew Douglas]

Thanks for the update on this.
Congrats to Brad on a great acquisition. As far as GoDaddy auctions - I've gotten a number of excellent names there but there is definitely a learning curve for folks to figure out what works and what doesn't... if it is a mid 3 figure or higher name you need to either be lucky or do your homework. There are lot of excellent alternative extension keyword domains that drop that get very little attention. And there are certain .coms that still sneak through and go for next to nothing.
Invest wisely.

[CloudDomainers]

People use the GD auction to test the market. However, (imo), the GD auction is flawed because we had to battle through several auction time extensions to finally win an expired dot com on the same day.

When is it fair to stop the auction instead of extending the time to drive up the price? The same domains you win in a competitive auction result in no action for 90% less than the price at a later time.

Since we focus on a niche where we own many good domains, the recent auction to acquire the dot com name was worth the fight. We stopped bidding, and then decided to pursue the name again since it is a rare opportunity. We wanted this name since it expired back in mid April.

You never know who will renew a name. We doubt the owner will renew this domain because it will cost them $80 to redeem. It is already canceled out of their portfolio. We suppose GD showing the owner of a domain name during the auction process enable buyers to contact owners.

We tried to contact a former video game company prior to auction with a name that they let drop due to their bankruptcy several years ago. It was a mid 90's generic name.

Nobody could lead us to the right decision maker. Therefore, the highly valuable domain went into auction at NameJet. We had a backup plan on that name, so it is not that big of a loss.

Interesting cloud dot us story. The auction looked interesting early on, but slowed down toward the end to close at the last price you reported. Congrats to the new owner of Cloud dot us for making a good decision to contact the owner.