You’re about to lose your historical data, so pay attention.
GoDaddy is shutting down the Uniregistry Market and parking service on April 18, the company announced today.
UPDATE: SEE WARNING AT END OF POST
This means that two key features will be going away: category targeting for parking pages and self-brokering.
Perhaps more troubling to domain owners will be that they are going to lose their historical lead information. GoDaddy has created a tool to download lead data, but it only goes back one year and does not include any information about the person who inquired about the domain name.
Uniregistry sends emails when a lead is received or communication is received that includes the inquirer’s information, but some domain investors might not have retained these emails because they knew the data was stored at Uniregistry.
This could be an issue if a domain investor gets a UDRP in the future. Frequently, a UDRP defense involves finding an inquiry from the Complainant in the past. This data will be wiped. It could also make it challenging to negotiate with someone who previously inquired about a domain and re-inquires in the future.
It would be helpful if GoDaddy created a tool to download all of this data before shutting down the service next month.
GoDaddy has created a migration tool to help customers move their domains to Afternic for both sales and parking. Customers will get an alert to migrate when they access their account.
WARNING
A word of warning, too. It’s not clear to me how much data moves over with domains when you migrate from Uni to Afternic. Do prices migrate? Which ones take precedence?
I start the migration today thinking it would give me some sort of information about what was migrating and give me a chance to confirm. Instead, after clicking the link I got a 502 error and then when refreshing, it told me the migration was in process.
They still have the old data, you can still access it if you know how, that they only allow the export up to 1 year is Godaddy being Godaddy.
I continue to wonder whether GoDaddy’s actions with regard to Uniregistry constitutes illegal monopolistic abuse. Would the ICA please comment on this? I hope GoDaddy hasn’t “bought” them too.
SaveUniorbePuny.com!
I started in 2014 with Frank’s DNS and it has been a fantastic tool. I will surely miss the interactions with buyers and all the crazy misplaced inquiries. The platform empowered me. Not happy…very sad.
Sad day for all domainers.
I’m surprised they haven’t shut down uniregistry completely yet.
“This means that two key features will be going away: category targeting for parking pages and self-brokering.”
As you point out, being able to know historical inquiry data has been a key informational advantage in UDRP disputes.
Likewise, targeted parking, in order to avoid incidental trademark claims in otherwise common words and phrases, was also a key defensive capability to deter or prevail in UDRP disputes.
These features provided crucially important mechanisms for domain registrants to protect themselves and defend their assets.
It will be interesting to see if they maintain targeted parking for their in-house domain portfolio. Over the years, through an inquiry-driven system, thousands of names in that portfolio were individually targeted to make sure that the PPC results remained consistent with the primary meanings of the terms within the domain names. If they turn off the manual targeting for those thousands of names, they are certainly going to keep Gerry busy, lol.
Andrew, the FAQs have now been updated to answer a lot of community questions: https://www.uniregistry.help/hc/en-us/articles/13282972101531-Market-Migration-FAQ