- Joined
- Apr 26, 2003
- Messages
- 110
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It's good to see that there continues to be strong and growing competition in the market for expired domain names.
It's interesting that people like DeletedDomains.com have been able to switch to charging real money for droplists and similar services (yes, i do consider US$9.99 per week per user to be real money, even with the steep long term discounts). It's even more interesting that they have been able to do this for quite some time now, despite the fact that there are many other services continuing to provide drop lists free of charge.
When i talk about the droplist market, I also include the 'little-guy' market - the people who are happier to pay $119.80 for registering 20 good names the day after they drop, rather than pay $120 for two possibly better names at places like SnapNames the day before (and the latter price assumes they are extremely lucky not to have competitors for those names). I think people in the know elsewhere in this forum have suggested that what i have termed the 'little guy' market above is significantly more than 50% in terms of domain name volume.
Droplists seem to be one of these services where it's very difficult to know that you are getting the real thing. How do you know whether the drop lists contain ALL the names that are being dropped from the Zone that day. Yes, you can subscribe to many different services and compare the length of the lists. Problem is, different services cannot even agree on how many names expire on any given day. Among the 15,000 - 30,000 domain names that are dropped into the pool of available names each day, you don't know whether the droplist provided by one service is shorter than it's direct competitor's droplist because they have access to fewer sources or because they register the really valuable names before they send the list out.
Similarly, what about speed? How do you know that you are not paying good money to a shady dealer who has subscribed to a good service and after registering the good domains distributes a list of the remaining names to his own subscribers.
Such questions can only be answered if somebody (for instance a dedicated service called DropLists.com) could afford to follow all available lists day in day out, and separate the wheat from the chaff.
You don't have to be very imaginative to see the possibilities. But then I'm always an optimist, so I'm sure there are many factors on the downside (but hopefully also some on the upside that i may not have thought about).
The good thing is, many of the people who have informed opinions probably visit this forum.
So what do you guys think? How much is DropLists.com worth to a speculator and how much to an end user (ball park indications are OK)?
It's interesting that people like DeletedDomains.com have been able to switch to charging real money for droplists and similar services (yes, i do consider US$9.99 per week per user to be real money, even with the steep long term discounts). It's even more interesting that they have been able to do this for quite some time now, despite the fact that there are many other services continuing to provide drop lists free of charge.
When i talk about the droplist market, I also include the 'little-guy' market - the people who are happier to pay $119.80 for registering 20 good names the day after they drop, rather than pay $120 for two possibly better names at places like SnapNames the day before (and the latter price assumes they are extremely lucky not to have competitors for those names). I think people in the know elsewhere in this forum have suggested that what i have termed the 'little guy' market above is significantly more than 50% in terms of domain name volume.
Droplists seem to be one of these services where it's very difficult to know that you are getting the real thing. How do you know whether the drop lists contain ALL the names that are being dropped from the Zone that day. Yes, you can subscribe to many different services and compare the length of the lists. Problem is, different services cannot even agree on how many names expire on any given day. Among the 15,000 - 30,000 domain names that are dropped into the pool of available names each day, you don't know whether the droplist provided by one service is shorter than it's direct competitor's droplist because they have access to fewer sources or because they register the really valuable names before they send the list out.
Similarly, what about speed? How do you know that you are not paying good money to a shady dealer who has subscribed to a good service and after registering the good domains distributes a list of the remaining names to his own subscribers.
Such questions can only be answered if somebody (for instance a dedicated service called DropLists.com) could afford to follow all available lists day in day out, and separate the wheat from the chaff.
You don't have to be very imaginative to see the possibilities. But then I'm always an optimist, so I'm sure there are many factors on the downside (but hopefully also some on the upside that i may not have thought about).
The good thing is, many of the people who have informed opinions probably visit this forum.
So what do you guys think? How much is DropLists.com worth to a speculator and how much to an end user (ball park indications are OK)?
