How much do you care about masked whois and has it affected your sales?

So Rob Monster started a thread about who should control a registrant’s whois? The thread also delves into how GDPR and how masked whois affects domain sales.

Rob posted:

Do professional domain investors accept these extra steps and tolerate the idea that their WHOIS data is masked or otherwise obscured, effectively forcing people to contact registrants through other means?

At the same time, ad blocking software have made many conventional parking landers effectively blank screens. Some parking companies have started to pivot using landers but most parking is still an easy ad block.

I ask this because I realize that many domain sellers have had a tough few months with selling domains. It dawned on me that the drop in domain selling activity appeared to coincide with GDPR rollout which kicked off in earnest on May 25, 2018 and where many registrars simply masked everything on WHOIS.

One thing I noticed is people are all over the map in how they value public whois with relation to domain sales.

Jurgen Wolf said

As for me, the direct inquiries to my WHOIS email were very rare even prior GDPR.
99.99% – spam only.

So it is not important for me in terms of sales.

While Korganian was doing a lot better in the days of fully public whois.

Before GDPR, I had a lot more people email me or call me on the phone to purchase my domains.

I loved those quick phone sales out of the blue!!!

All the sales were to end users for a nice profit too.

Now Rob included a poll with regards to who should control whois on a domain name.

Some members said they did not care about whois one bit.