We Are Now a Dot-Com

It's hard luck on the person who sent me an email from Australia yesterday asking whether I'd be interested in buying the DepList.com domain name, which was about to expire and be released to the public. "Of course," I said. "How much?" A few hours later, the response came, with a suggested price of US$450. "You must be joking," I replied. Or words to that effect.

Meanwhile I did some research on WHOIS and discovered the place where it might be possible to acquire the domain for $69, just as long as no other bidders entered the game. So I contacted the Australian to say I was going to do my own bidding, thank you very much, and that my maximum bid would be very low. I craftily added that I certainly wouldn't be interested in any subsequent "offers" from anyone who outbid me, because I didn't particularly need the dot-com name. It would be nice to have if I could get it cheaply, I said, but it was not essential for my site's success. I had in fact contacted the previous owner of deplist.com some years ago, but he was not prepared to sell it. My tactical response at the time was to buy the deplist.net and deplist.org names, thereby adding value to my domain and reducing the value of his by a tiny fraction!

Switching back to yesterday's adventure, I hoped that my feigned disinterest would thus deter my speculator from bidding against me, and off I went to try my luck with SnapNames, the site that WHOIS told me to visit if I wanted to place a bid. I put in my maximum offer and waited.

In theory, I might have been able to get it more cheaply later on (if no one registers an interest in a name, SnapNames doesn't bother to acquire it), but I didn't want to run the risk of a "domain acquisition specialist" (i.e. shark) buying it in the interim and then trying to sell it to me for some outrageous sum. Whether or not it would be bought depended on whether it was worth anything, so I checked with some valuation sites. Two of these estimated the deplist.com name to be worth $3,000 (as opposed to $600 for deplist.co.uk and $0 for several other .com names I put into the calculator for comparison). I was careful to choose valuation sites which estimated the value of domain names per se rather than the value of websites, so that figure of $3,000 suggested to me that I should snap it up while I could. The .com names are generally worth more than .co.uk names. Even .co without the "m" at the end is a less valuable suffix.

As auction-opening time approached, I went back to SnapNames to see what was happening. Fortunately, no-one had come to bid against me — least of all the Australian who'd been hoping to take $450 from me — and I secured the dot-com for the minimum opening bid of $69. I shall remain eternally grateful to my Antipodean tipster shark for letting me know that the domain was about to become available.

Many dot-com names that come up for sale do not remain on offer for more than a second. They are grabbed instantly by outfits like the one that was offering to sell deplist.com for $69 before it had even come onto the market. The more valuable the name, the more likely it is to be snapped up the instant it is released. Sites like SnapNames fire off automated requests to buy them at the rate of several times per second, starting from just before they are released on the market, so there's no way individuals like us can compete against them. Such sites compete with each other too for good domain names, but sometimes they have special arrangements with the registrars that are about to put expired names on sale — a bit like a house vendor having an exclusive contract with a single agent to sell the property. Which is how deplist.com came to be listed on WHOIS as being for sale via SnapNames.

It's taken eight years to acquire our .com, and it now complements the .net and .org in our stable — all the names that matter. Here's an extended article on the subject of acquiring domain names by someone who had a similar experience to mine and who also used SnapNames to acquire his domain name.