Expiring Names - GoDaddy

There are a number of methods to spot trends in domaining. One is to read sales reports for Sedo, Snap and many of the new auction platforms such as Bido, Epik and others. Another method is to read boards such as this which summarize results in posts. Lastly, you can simply look at the results in expiring or pre-release aftermarket product platforms such as Namejet and GoDaddy.

In today's post we examine two different Carousel TLDs, and differences in both price and bidding.

On September 12th and 13th of 1996, Carousel.net and Carousel.org were registered by Roger Burgess of The Carousel Network Organization. Over the next 13 years, both received backlinks and had sites built on them, though only Carousel.org got listed in dmoz and potentially had a pagerank 1 at expiration. However, as a general rule domain buyers tend to market .orgs as a lesser caliber than .net for the same terms.

While this would generally be a well-followed rule, lately most .org domains are nearly equal to .net of the same quality, and attract just as many bidders. On Friday and Saturday at GoDaddy's auction platform, Carousel.net hit a max bid of $425 while Carousel.org reached a top bid of $907.

This discrepancy can't be accounted for by the mere presence of a dmoz listing or possible PR1, both of which together might add $50 to the top price of a domain. The difference between Friday and Saturday bidders seems to be diminished by the fact that most of the bidding began days before either domain hit its final day. Is this simply the price someone paid to corner the Carousel market? If so why was competition so much higher on the .ORG vs the .NET when the term Carousel does not appear to offer any significant advantage as a keyword?

Carousels are still bought and sold on the open market for fairgrounds and circuses, so certainly that would put the advantage squarely on NET, but for some reason, ORG won out. Is there a word association bidders see between Carousel and an ORG domain? Has demand actually shifted?

We have been touting single word dictionary Orgs for some time (though we also own a good quantity of Nets) as we expected this type of market flip on some generics that could be construed as both non-profit or commercial. NET has officially drifted into "commerical-only" ground and we think it's time to start getting your fingers on some good ORGs.