Originally posted by Beachie
Wow! Talk about a thread getting blown out of proportion. So what if whois-search posts a few expiring domains? Anyone who is serious in this business should be at least 2 months ahead of the game. By the time a domain is expiring it's generally waaaaay too late to do anything about it.
This forum is here to discuss expiring domains, so too bad if you don't have your shit together early enough.
Not necessarily Beachie. Imagine an excellent generic that expired a couple of months ago but for some reason it managed to slip under the radar of most expiring lists. It's now in the delete cycle and because you've been watching it for over a year, you've got the Snap on it, and top bids of around $150 at NameWinner, NicGenie, DropCatcher and NameFox, with six hours to drop time. Possibly only one other person is aware of the name and because that person is likewise of modest means, the bids are reasonable and will probably max at $500.
Then someone posts the name at DNF and within minutes the wealthy bidders wake up and join the chase, and the bids surge to 5k, then 10k and upwards, leaving you with just the Snap whereas minutes before you had a solid chance of getting the name. The post alerts other pro drop catchers around the globe, reducing further your chances.
Of course no one owns a deleting name and we're all vultures after fair game, but put yourselves in the shoes of this person and it's easy to see how they would be extremely upset with the fact the name was posted in a public forum. It happened to me a while back, but I was fortunate to use a relatively new service to grab the name at a bargain price.
On the other side of the coin I've used the free services of LocalWhois to identify excellent single word generic .coms a day or so before they've dropped, and have grabbed them through the best drop catchers at modest bids, beating out those with Snaps etc who had been watching the names for many months, or maybe a year.
But these days the drop game has gone crazy and time is no longer a factor in getting the best names, it's simply the size of your budget to enable you to get the top bids with the pro catchers. There are exceptions to this of course, ad.net with SnapNames beong one example.