It’s clear that a lot of people lost trust yesterday. Here are a few poll questions to see how the Snapnames bidding scandal will change your behavior.

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Also, if you’ve already received notice of your rebate, please leave a comment with the amount.

Report provides insight into expired domain names.

Nominet, the registry for the .uk country code, has released its 2009 Domain Name Industry Report (pdf). It includes in-depth stats about domain renewal rates and the reasons people let domains expire. This data should be useful to the ICANN Working Group examining the issue of expiring domains.

As way of background, there are a couple differences between .uk and most other domains. First, registrations are for two years. Second, Nominet sends renewal reminders to customers (in addition to the registrar sending reminders).

For those people renewing their domains, Nominet found:

- 60% renewed due to a reminder from their registrar (same figure as similar research from 2007)
- 25% believe their domain names renew automatically (2007: 22%)
- 7.3% renewed after receiving reminders from Nominet (2007: 8.6%)

Fully 98.2% of those surveyed recall receiving reminders about renewing their domain name. This isn’t too surprising. After all, if Nominet was able to reach people for its study, those people likely have up-to-date contact information on their domain names. As I’ve said before, the number one reason someone neglects to renew an important domain name is because they have outdated or false whois data.

This graph explains the reasons people decided to not renew their domains:

This chart shows something we all know, but it’s still interesting: if you get someone to renew a domain once, odds are they’ll keep renewing it:

The Nominet report has lots of other renewal and registration data, and is worth reviewing.

Conspiracy theorists were right about Snapnames bidder.

Domain Name News has confirmed that the bidder at the center of the SnapNames employee bidding controversy used the handle “Halvarez”. Domainers have questioned Halvarez’s bidding patterns for years, as DNN discovered.

Domainers are particularly adept at online research. But a lot of times they cook up bogus conspiracy theories. Like the guy who swore NameJet was shill bidding, until I quickly pointed out that the person who kept beating him at auction was Frank Schilling.

But this time rampant speculation about Halvarez at SnapNames was actually warranted. Many people speculated that Halvarez was SnapNames, which was incorrect. But the connection was certainly there.

On December 12, 2007, DNForum member Seraphim wrote:

I believe halvarez is SnapNames, regardless of the fact that he/she bids on domains, or even wins auctions. A year ago, I could spot which domains in my drop list would not have competitive bidders, I would obviously delete these names from my account, and pick them up at reg fee once they dropped. However, for a solid 8 months now I cannot do this, as halvarez bids on every single domain that I enter into my SnapNames drop list. I could enter the shittiest name possible up for drops, and there is a 100% chance halvarez will be there. The kicker is however, if I don’t enter the name into my SnapNames auction list, you guessed it, it drops with no bids and I pick it up at reg fee. Anyone from SnapNames care to explain this phenomenon?

Other forum members also speculated about some sort of connection, but some pointed out that what Halvarez was doing didn’t require inside access to SnapNames.

Now the next question on everyone’s mind is, “shouldn’t SnapNames have discovered this earlier”?

Perhaps. Keep in mind the problem began in 2005, before Oversee.net bought SnapNames. A lot of changes have happened since then. And over the summer, Craig Snyder took over management of SnapNames and Moniker. That meant a fresh pair of eyes was looking over the books. Surely the issue of who this prolific bidder was came up then if it hadn’t before.

The SnapNames employee “stole” money from the company be refunding part of his purchases. I doubt senior management at SnapNames would let that happen. But I’m sure more will be dug up soon, so stay tuned.

Snapnames employee bid in auctions, but the bigger news is how company is handling it.

You’ll probably read a lot today about how a SnapNames employee had been bidding on auctions for the past four years. In case you haven’t heard the story, here’s a brief recap:

-Employee opened account in another name and started bidding in 2005
-Participated in about 5% of auctions, mostly between 2005-2007
-S/He won about 1% of the auctions during this period (so about 20% of the auctions he participated in)

The employee’s actions violated SnapNames policy.

This is obviously bad news for SnapNames and Oversee.net. But how they have handled the situation shows the company’s commitment to professionalism and making things right.

It had a policy in place. First, it’s important to remember that SnapNames had a policy in place prohibiting employees from bidding in auctions, as the company told me after the GoDaddy flareup. That wasn’t the case at GoDaddy, although that has since been rectified.

After discovering the problem, SN did a full investigation. Based on material released from SnapNames, it’s clear that the company did an entire audit back to 2005 to figure out exactly which domain auctions were effected. Apparently the employee’s bidding accounted for about 1% of total SnapNames revenue. [Update: it appears that some people have speculated about the user involved for some time. Acro on DNForum even wrote back in 2006 "Some have speculated Halvarez is Snapnames, which I don't believe." Domain Name News has confirmed that username "Halvarez" was the associated employee.]

SnapNames released the story to its customers and media. Rather than push the issue under the rug, SnapNames sent a release to domain bloggers today informing them of the problem and what it is doing to resolve it.

The company is putting its money where its mouth is. Rather than just say “sorry”, SnapNames is going to pay –literally. The company will offer a rebate to customers who bid in auctions against the SnapNames employee, which would have caused them to pay more for the domain than if the employee had not bid. In addition to the rebate, it will pay interest.

To summarize, this is an unfortunate event for SnapNames and the domain industry. But the cleanup shows that the industry is growing up and becoming more professional. SnapNames is taking responsibility for its (employee’s) actions, and should be commended.

I also hope that other domain auction sites heed the warning and set up internal controls.

Epik buys drop catching search and registration tool.

Rob Monster’s Epik has acquired JustDropped, an expired domain search and drop catching service.

Last week at the SedoPro event in Key West Monster and JustDropped owner Dan Rubin were glued at the hip. I chatted with both of them about the future of Epik, but assumed the reason they were so tight was that Monster was using JustDropped for catching domains for his Epik network. Apparently it was a little bit closer than that.

Currently JustDropped is an information service with separate drop catching software. But Monster told me this afternoon that the site will add functionality to let individuals make backorders directly through the service.

This is the second technology acquisition Epik has announced in the past couple months. In August it acquired the DNKO auction platform.

Epik is quickly assembling key pieces to the domain ecosystem. Of course, the trick is pulling them altogether.

By the way, Rob, if you’re looking to acquire a blog…