A couple of months ago the IEDR released a list of deleted domains.
So how is the “after market” faring? Are the domains being “snapped up” as quickly as their availability is made known?
It’s hard to say unless you check the list on a regular basis, however it does seem to be turning up some gems.
The list today, for example, included gems such as:
- dvdrental.ie
- babyshop.ie
- companyshop.ie
- flatfinder.ie
- Hairdressers.ie
- video.ie
If these domains have been left expire it shows just how little a good domain name really means if it isn’t backed by something more. Or does it?
What happens with these domains when they are registered again? Does Google sandbox them?
Should the IEDR be looking at offering these domains at a premium rate? Or should there be some kind of web service for resellers to inform their clients of “hot” deletions?
Idle speculation?
Maybe not entirely. The recent debate about personal domains here demonstrates that some people are interested in the subject 🙂
IEDR is just not good at marketing. And the aftermarket for domains involves marketing. The domain buyers have to be aware of these domains rather than the hosters. But the domain buying public thinks .com rather than .ie and looks upon the .ie ccTLD as being an overpriced business only domain. Due to the voodoo dance of proving entitlement to a .ie domain, the only potential .ie domain buyers would be businesses.
The most interesting aftermarket domain that was snapped up was local.ie – the failed Nua/Eircom venture that had all the imagination of a telephone directory run by people without telephones. The local.ie domain was snatched by Browseireland a few months after it dropped and I think that Google hardly even noticed the difference in PR terms. It maintained its high PR even though the domain was deleted and reregistered and has a completely different site.
Many of the thousands of deleted .ie domains are hard to market. Indeed, there is a high percentage of generic domains among them. Generics might seem like a good investment for cybersquatters but the reality is that generics are very hard to market. Other deleted .ie domains are company and business names.
Google, like most of the top tier search engines, is clueless when it comes to ccTLDs. Based on the local.ie case, the sandbag does not apply to ccTLDs, especially a one as small as the .ie ccTLD.
What makes you think that domain buyers are not business?
If you take the example of dvdrental.ie, how would a non-business be able to exploit that domain ? They would have to be a business of some kind.
You also ignore the loosening of the IEDR’s rules with regard to registrations. Yes it is easier for a business to register an IE domain than it is for an individual, but I would posit that domain registration is too easy in many instances and is thus open to abuse.
The sandbag comment is interesting. There haven’t been that many high profile IE domains like local.ie, but there probably have been quite a few smaller ones.
It would be interesting to investigate that further.
I would like to sell this prestigious domain name. Any tips