A lot of names that get reported sold at Go Daddy are getting renewed this past week.
iSki.com $9,201, renewed.
Specifics.com $8,000, renewed.
Smarketing.com $5,608, renewed.
MicroApartment.com $1,408, transferred to NameBright.
MicroApartments.com $1,325, transferred to NameBright.
GGBL.com $1,708, renewed til 2026.
Zaine.com $4,809, renewed.
We all know this is the system but it does make it hard on a site like Namebio to have to remove names every week. Some sales of course are quoted for comps and in reality there is no comp.
Ty for this, all these sites report sales and it is all utter nonsense. When does this backwater industry clean itself up ?
@Jason,
While I fully agree that domaining remains a “backwater industry” that needs to “clean itself up”, it’s far from accurate to write off all sales reports as “utter nonsense”.
As somebody who writes 1 of the regular sales reports, I take issue with that. And I’d like to stand up for DNJournal, NameBio, and DNPrices as well.
Transparency, open discussion, and free-flowing information – that is how the domain DOES clean itself up. That’s how we attract outside professionals, gain credibility, and cease to be a backwater.
Sites that report sales – and make an effort to do so accurately – are crucial for that transparency. Pointing out errors in data or methodology is a welcome criticism, but disparaging those sites in general isn’t helpful.
A considerable amount of work goes into gathering and presenting sales data. To go further and filter out dubious transactions requires even more work. Actively researching and validating each and every sale would be a full time job –probably requiring more than 1 person. That’s not only impractical; it’s actually impossible, since we don’t always have enough information.
Realistically, we can only go so far. Reporting sales pays very badly in comparison to, say, selling. This industry isn’t far enough along to pay analysts well, as I’ve often said to Jamie Zoch. Many of us go far beyond what we’re required to do, vetting data day after day with no expectation of being reimbursed for our time. And we do it because we want to clean up this industry; we want to drag it, kicking and screaming, out of the scummy backwater where it’s most at home and into the mainstream.
Readers of sales reports must meet us half way. People must understand what they’re looking at, what has been validated and what remains for the reader to look into.
Examples:
DNJournal – Ron Jackson actually verifies the financials. That means the transactions went through, and the reported prices are more likely to be accurate. Downside: Only a minority of sales are shown, since sellers / market places must volunteer their information. Also, nothing is reported below a fairly high threshold.
NameBio and DNSalePrices – They gather final prices from auction platforms and compile reported sales from other online sources. Generally, no time is spent validating these sales – only de-listing transactions after a problem is noticed. That’s all they have time for. People should use this information as a starting point for their own research. It’s mostly accurate. If error detection were crowd-sourced – meaning we all report errors – then the data would be purified
over time.
DNW – In my weekly reports, I filter out seller-managed auctions, showing only domains that are part of the expiry cycle. Prices aren’t necessarily sales – just bidding results. That’s inevitable, since many transactions don’t finish until the following week. By that point I’m writing the next week’s article and too busy to check a few hundred domains from the prior week yet again. Sometimes I notice a failed transaction and return with a note but not always. In the monthly reports, all types of sales are included; and NameJet itself vouches for the payments as being complete.
A mechanism could be devised for automatically checking whether a transaction went through – maybe a month or 2 after the fact. But that”s a tricky algorithm to write. And it’s an expensive process. Remember, we’d need to validate hundreds of thousands of transactions spanning decades. And that means digging through Whois history for each and every transaction. Who will fund that project? Ah, of course, nobody.
False data does no one any favors. So in your elitist opinion what good does specifics.com showing sold for $8000 on Namebio do ?
Ron Jackson gets proof no one else does unless it is the Sedo report.
Compensation ? It is your blog sell ads
@Jason,
Why do you call me an elitist? An elitist refuses to engage with people. That’s the opposite of what I’m doing.
“False data does no one any favors.”
As if I’m advocating for false data! Anyway, you’re wrong. False data does many people in this industry PLENTY of favors!
“It is your blog sell ads”
No, it isn’t my blog. Ads don’t pay me a penny.
Alleman doesn’t pay you ? he has a lot of ads. I said elitist as you talked down to me. Bottom line Name Bio has hundreds of bogus sales.
@Jason,
No, I didn’t talk down to you. Can you point to anything condescending? Rather, I took you seriously, partly agreeing and partly disagreeing with you.
Yes, Andrew Alleman pays me a fixed fee. I’m paid reasonably well by this industry’s standards. Less than I’d be paid anywhere else. And nowhere near enough to justify the time I put into things. It’s my choice to spend my time on research. Payment lessens my financial loss but doesn’t compensate me. Measured purely in renewal fees per day, I lose money every time I turn away from domain resale to research or write about the domain industry as a whole. DNW’s advertisers don’t pay me; in fact, I’m personally boycotting 1 company.
Ron Jackson gets proof, yes. But even DNJournal has sometimes let bad information slip through. As I pointed out above, DNJournal’s standards can’t be extended to cover sites like NameBio or DNSalePrice. They deal with far more data than DNJournal does – more venues, a lower price threshold, plus sales that aren’t voluntarily shared. Manually verifying financials is impossible because the sellers will never furnish the information.
Either we accept that and use the data, knowing what it is, or else we ignore that data. Sales reports are a tool. We must be smarter than our tools – meaning we can use them to save time but must ultimately do our own thinking.
So the data is worthless ?
I see Godaddy to blame letting people renew after someone commits four figures.
Can you provide a follow-up on these domains whether they were strictly renewals from owners or renewals followed by sales to others? The transfers to Namebright is a curious thing on face value.
Same owner in Singapore
There is no such a thing as worthless DATA.
I wonder how many were renewed after noticing the auction?
or how many registrants were alerted by someone wanting to buy the domain?
Horseshit ! If there are names reported sold that were never sold that’s not bad that’s fucked up. I am sure there are names reported sold from years ago, that morons quote as sold to justify their prices. Oh but they never sold ?
The data that’s being gathered represent final auction prices. Usually auctions lead to sales, but in a minority of cases they don’t.
Certainly auctions that don’t finalize ought to be excluded from sales databases or identified after a report is published. But it’s easier said than done.
Anybody who sees a reported sale that didn’t actually go through ought to report that fact. Then NameBio and DNSalePrices can delete the record. That’s responsible domainer “citizenship”, folks.
If you don’t have time to report 1 interrupted / fake sale, then it’s hardly fair to denounce people who are reporting half a million transactions, demanding that they investigate them all.
Yes, of course, we should purge the data. Emphasis on “WE”.
@Joseph Peterson I agree Joseph it is an arduous task, this blog was the first that was doing a daily sales recap, I stopped doing it because of the number of sales I realized would not have really gone through. I noted between sales and closes, Sedo is a sale, Go Daddy is a close.
There is no way Namebio can check each name, when Michael gets word he removes, I know he and I and Kevin Fink would email when a Flippa sale did not go through. Kevin was very good letting us both know the auction did not go through.
I do see the point of view of those upset as well, because from a comparison standpoint stuff can get skewed.
@Raymond Hackney,
The right answer, in my opinion, is to gather and publish data, since most reported sales are real. Then to crowd-source problem spotting.
We also need an ongoing discussion about which kind of issues affect which venues and which reports. That way, people know how to interpret the data they’re presented with.
Domainers should know how to continue the validation process themselves (because bulk reports can only go half the distance).
We should always examine the way things are reported – whether domain sales or news stories. The solution isn’t less reporting; it’s more critique – more discussion about reporting.
Well you know how that goes Joseph, people would rather complain. I stopped because there were alot of complaints that they were being misled, even though I stated the difference between close and sale. I email Michael at Namebio when I see stuff. That 55588.com sale and finally got the myth of Golf.tv at $600,000.
That one is a perfect example cited for years as the most expensive .tv sale. I had said for years it was not a real sale. Finally interviewed buyer and got him to say he did not pay that much.
I agree most complete and transfer, over a decade the false positive do add up though.
@Raymond Hackney,
Absolutely, there are bogus sales in the mix. You understand these issues quite well, but others may not.
Realistically, what can people do?
(A) Should we erase websites like NameBio and DNSalePrices? Prohibit daily or weekly reports? Certainly, that gets rid of the small percentage of erroneous sale prices. But it also obliterates the reliable data, which I’d estimate at 99% overall. Personally, I’d rather have access to all that data, errors and all, so that we can evaluate it.
(B) Should we insist that those who report sales wait until all transactions have finished? That can take weeks. Some NamesCon results (from January) didn’t finalize until March. But people wanted to see the results back then in January. If they were naïve, then they believed them all. If they paid attention, then they understood some weren’t yet complete, while a few might even have been rigged. Nobody needed a time delay; they just needed to understand what the data meant. Verifying a transaction is complete isn’t always easy. Whois checks can be inconclusive. Market places, buyer, and sellers may not share info; and they sometimes lie.
(C) Should we insist that NameBio / DnSalePrices not report sales from the past 20+ years until each transaction has been validated? That means checking huge amounts of Whois history. A standard DomainTools account gets you 50 lookups per month. At that rate, it would take about 10,000 years! No, somebody would need to write an algorithm. And then they’d need to pay DomainTools a 5 or 6-figure sum to crawl their database! And that doesn’t even validate the prices – just a fraction of the changes of ownership!
(D) Should we accept an imperfect reality; use the data we have, understanding its limitations; and pool our time and skills and energy to put up sign posts where we spot problems?
I’m for (D).
I hope you were not thinking I preferred A,B or C.
I think everyone does a good job. There is no way for a perfect system, so some will still get bothered by the process.
I thought they had didn’t remove names, as it is too much hassle to verify.
Ring fence them away from the previous registrant, like NetSol.
Current practice is akin to selling goods one does not own.
Joseph how do you know there is a small portion that do not complete ?
At godaddy I would say it is close to 40% on anything $500 and above. That is a faulty mechanism.
When I first started in this biz a couple years ago this site was part of my breakfast checking your sales recap Raymond.
Why did you stop ?
If I may ask why are you providing a soapbox for Mr. Peterson who works for an enemy publication ?
I stopped because it was getting to be a lot of work doing everything manually. Secondly some complained the sales not going through. I still check them daily.
Joseph and I are cool and I respect his work so I appreciate the time he puts into the comments.
@Raymond Hackney,
Thanks. I comment most at sites where I respect the author and the audience. Like this 1.
@Frank,
Why do you carve up this industry into enemies? How about colleagues?
This comments section isn’t a soap box for me anymore than it is for you or anybody else. People contribute or engage as they see fit. Some people write a little. I stick my neck out more than most … and get kicked in the teeth more than most. Many people prefer to just read.
I fail to see why we should be enemies.
Verifying sales is often tricky and always time consuming. And even if you “verify” a WHOIS change, you still can’t be 100% sure of the price because many venues sell to the runner up when the winner doesn’t pay instead of doing a re-auction. In this case you know a sale happened but the price could be thousands less than the auction ended at. And when I say you “know” I use that word very loosely, because someone could renew and change the WHOIS, put it under privacy, etc. Heck, the sale could be valid but the winner puts it back in the old owner’s name for a bit to make it look like it didn’t complete.
Smarketing.com is a good example of a tricky one. This was renewed, but both the WHOIS and the DNS are totally different than before it expired. I assume Ray looked up the company name that used to be in the WHOIS and did a WHOIS on that, and then you can tell that it never actually changed hands. But at a quick glance it looks like a sale went through.
To create software that can deal with all of these crazy situations would be both difficult and very expensive. WHOIS history is 18 cents per query the last I checked. To verify a sale you’d have to check several dates around the date of the closed auction, at minimum one date a few months before expiration and one date around a month after expiration. So to even make a rough pass at cleaning up the existing data would cost around $150,000 and almost $400/day moving forward. NameBio doesn’t even make $400 per day so that, or hiring two full-time staffers to verify every sale, simply isn’t practical.
We do our best to give people a clue what is going on in a market almost entirely devoid of transparency. But to expect perfect accuracy with the volume of data we’re providing isn’t reasonable. Like Joseph said, use it as a guide and do your own homework from there.
I would love to see more venues stepping up and sharing data, and not just the $2k+ sales either. That’s the only realistic way to have completely accurate data. But given the value of this data, many venues don’t want to share and see it as a proprietary advantage. So the only alternative is to let us know when you notice a sale didn’t go through and crowd source it. I’m more than happy to remove sales that didn’t complete and I do it on a regular basis.
I removed the sales Ray pointed out after confirming them myself.
@Michael,
Yep. $150,000 is the “5 or 6-figure sum” I figured. Knew it was too expensive to bother. In comparison, the algorithm’s the easy part.
I doubt there will ever be a day when reporting sales data is profitable enough to justify the expense of thoroughly verifying that data.