One domainer investigated who was buying the domains it lost at auction.
Do you ever follow up on domains you lose at expired domain auctions? If you’re like most people, you just move on to the next domain.
But domain investor Digiventures Media Group, led by Fred Kauber, went back and looked at 150 GoDaddy auctions it lost over the past 12 months.
The data was interesting. In a tweet, it noted:
1) 47.3% of these auctions were won by HugeDomains; another 16.6% were won by PerfectDomain. These 2 players accounted for 63.9% of these auction wins,
highlighting the power of automation and capital in this marketplace.
That’s a significant percentage!
It went on to note that only one of the domains it lost appears to currently be in use by an end user. The remaining domains point to domain sales platforms.
You can see the full tweet thread here.
Thanks very much for raising awareness of this data via your article Andrew! I’m glad that you found the data as interesting as we did; it’s a sobering reminder of some of the competitive forces and different approaches at work in the industry. We are still mining the data set for additional insights, such as pricing patterns, and will be sure to share with you. Hope to see you at ICA in Vegas!
I tracked my loses before HugeDomains were most, and another paticular inverstor was second. It wasn’t PerfectDomain for me. No point in mentioning their name, they just got good taste in domain names
HugeDomains is a “HUGE” problem on GoDaddy Auctions, they have been for awhile. GoDaddy just let’s it happen.
If I’m going to lose a domain auction to them, they’re going to pay!;-) Lol
It’s definitely frustrating as a party bidding against these platforms, but I don’t really expect GoDaddy to do anything about it as they are in the business to sell domain names and make money (as the recent commission changes demonstrate). I congratulate HugeDomains and others following that model for assembling the resources to dominate a marketplace playing by the existing rules, and presumably to make a profit doing it. Our goal in doing the analysis was to use a statistically significant data set to highlight how the game is being played even though many intuitively knew, so that way we can adapt and play to our own strengths.
I agree with Fred on this one. If you think HugeDomains shouldn’t be able to put all of its money to work, then should we draw a cutoff at people that buy more than 1,000 domains a year? 50? I know they are frustrating to competitors, but I don’t think they’re doing anything wrong.
Godaddy is in the wrong here. Not an equal opportunity marketplace.
I do think that for a period of several years (I believe 2017-2022 but may be off) there was good cause to say that the GoDaddy Auctions platform was unfair given that API access was restricted such that new players could not use it, but legacy players like HugeDomains still retained access to play our their automated strategies. The rationale for this was that there were performance constraints on that version of the API. My understanding is that GoDaddy addressed this in July 2022 by re-opening API access to all developers with a brand new API that could scale better. Assuming that the technology playing field has now been leveled, it comes down to determination and ingenuity to use those tools coupled with a BIG bank account, and mileage is understandably going to vary across domain investors on that basis.
That’s a fair point. I know the API is more broadly available now but I’m not sure if it’s available for all aspects of bidding on domains.