It is at godaddy in the redemtion period. I just watched one go through the redemption period only to be taken by a domain name harvester (name I just made up. LOL) It wasn't a good name, but I was hoping to point their previous customers to my site, but they had very little ranking or links and the name isn't even good. Now for another site I have in a similar place - dumb name, not that good in links, but hope to grab a few of the links that are good and point those people to our site.
Expired domain business is very BIG business. Some fairly average domains go at expired domain auctions for several $ dollars...is certainly becoming big business. These days most domains that drop, and "domainers" have interest in get caught by drop catching services which auction them off to the highest bidder.....as I posted in another thread I know of some people wth 300,000 domains...and lots with more than 10,000..(unfortunetly I am not one of them)..of course I am talking about are comprised of mostly decent quality, type-in (traffic) domains (mostly .com)
I agree with Lucky Bastard. Domaining has become a game for those with deep pockets. Luckly, some nice names occasionally slip under the radar and can be had for a reasonable price. If you really want a name, Godaddy isn't the place to backorder it. If the name has any popularity, there will already be backorders on it elsewhere (Pool, Namewinner, Snapnames etc). These backorder services have had a better track record historically of "catching" the desirable names that actually drop. Make accounts at the various backorder places and place a backorder at each of them for the name you want. The backorder at most of them is free, unlike Godaddy, which means you only pay if you actually get the name.
Well, I got the name that I backordered on godaddy today. I actually am surprised. Caveman if you read my prior posts the domain names I am refering to are not highly desired names by far, I just want to get any remaining links and old customers they may have had. The chances of anyone else even knowing the names existed are about .0000001%
All statistics just for .com ! Daily deleted domains: 330 000 Daily registred domains: 355 000 Estimated percentage of deleted domains backordered: 40% (give your estimate) Daily domains previously registered, now free: 198 000 Cost per one domain: 4.00 USD Daily cost for registering all now-free domains: 792 000 USD Yearly cost for registering all now-free domains: 289 080 000 USD I suppose you can do around 0.2 USD per click in average from Google adsense, so you would need 20 clicks per year to be at break-even point, which I think is not managable for all this strange names that have been registered. I think you can do maximum 5 clicks per domain, per year, so that makes 1.00 USD per domain or 72 270 000 USD revenue. You would need a very active sales to sell some of the remaining domains to make enough money to finance this event. I think in long run, the project is not feasible.
Like Jbw said.. Most of them will be deleted within 7 days and the registrat wont pay a dime.. So they just have to mass register everything they can.. Wait a few days to see which gets traffic and then they "re-drop" the ones that dont.. Actually quite clever if you have the muscle to pull it off! Leaves the rest of us out to dry though