Afternic Domain Listing Service announced on their blog that they will begin auctioning expiring domain names on the Afternic site
Auctions will run 7 days and bidders will have to pre-order a domain name before it is put in to the auction cue. Pre-orders can be made up to 35 days ahead of a domain name being deleted.
The inventory of domain names to be auctioned come from the pre-delete expiring domains from registrar partner MelbourneIT. Previously, MelbourneIT’s expiring domain inventory was being handled with auction services by SnapNames.com. This switch represents one more registrar partner loss for SnapNames. Previous to this switch, NetworkSolutions.com also moved their expiring inventory from SnapNames, opting instead to auction their domain names on the NameJet.com site in partnership with Enom.com
Afternic joins the ranks of other expiring domain auction companies that have exclusive pre-delete auctions with registrar partners including NameJet.com (NSI and Enom expiring domains), SnapNames.com (Register.com, Directi and others), Pool.com ( Momentous registrars), Tucows and TDNAM.com (Godaddy expiring domains). No word yet on whether Afternic plans to add additional registrars partners.
As the domain business has grown and the supply of quality expiring domain names has dwindled, rather than consolidating the marketplace seems to be splintering off or decentralizing into more and more boutique shops which have exclusive inventories of domains. Registrars test domains for traffic and keep domains for themselves. They begin accepting pre-orders or backorders for the domain names even before they are put into the delete cue. It is now rare for any “legacy domain” to even reach the pending delete status. The demand has hastened the decentralization effect as well as registrars saw where the real money was in domains and the potential in the expiring domain after-market. For domain name “drop chasers” the creation of one more auction venue, like the AfternicDLS site, means bidding at yet another site for a smaller batch of the overall expiring inventory and inevitably more work in monitoring/tracking each auction venue.
AfternicDLS’s parent company NameMedia made an announcement in June to start a strategic marketing effort with MelbourneIT . You can download a list of names to bid on at the Afternic website
afternic, domain auction, domain auctions, melbourneIT, namemedia, Snapnames
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Original post by Adam Strong
