Monday, January 02, 2006

Auctioning Domain Names

I just recently heard about the secondary market for auctioning old domain names

Apparently there is such a demand for the expired domain names that registrars are now setting up a place to bid. The winner of the bid gets to have it.

Now, from a standpoint of hearing that, it sounds like a good idea. However, if someone has set out to get an expiring domain name using one of the services provided by the registrars and it is somewhat of a more visible domain name, is there financial insentive to hold off giving the expired name to the company requesting it? Could some of the unethical registrars actually buy the name themselves and then place it up for auction?

Certainly there have been large companies that buy thousands of expired domain names in order to try and gather the traffic flow from these sites. Eventually this traffic flow subsides, or if it does not subside, visitors will quickly click off the website when they see it is not what they wanted. Typically these types of websites have advertisments only with many links or copied text from others. The content value dimishes with the search engines over time. So, these companies spend their dollars continually scarfing up old website domains.

I am sure there are some ethical registrars that follow proper procedures and would not try to squeeze an individual or business. There probably is a code of ethics or ICANN maybe has some sort of procedure in place to help with Auctioning Domain Names.

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