Expiring Names - NameJet

The Auction for 99bb.com completed yesterday (August 28th 2009) with a massive final bid of $12,599 USD. This is not surprising given the volume of traffic shown on Alexa Ranking for the domain.

Some heavy hitters entered the bidding war, with "wowogame" winning the final bid after a long showdown with "who". Also in the bidding war were "buydomains", "cnsun", "iteasy" and "demand", all of whom have very good reputations on the platform - so no shill bidding was happening here (for once!). Below is a screenshot of the final auction page. I bowed out early but had my bid in weeks ago in hopes of getting a shot.

Archive.org's screenshot of 99bb.com from 2007 shows it was an asian porn site. Ownership had changed hands from a location in Amsterdam to one in Barcelona around this time. In 2008 the domain name was being redirected to XVN.com and registered to xvngroup-at-gmail-com.

Content on the site has varied greatly so exact figures for real traffic would be hard to guess. Alexa shows that this traffic could be 25,000 visitors daily. Compete shows 5000 US visitors monthly, but this is not a US site - so we could estimate this at 1% of volume, making the site a million visitors monthly.

Clearly sites like this are worth a pretty penny to traffic buyers. However, with email changing hands from several standard domains to a gmail account in 2009, one has to wonder why the site made this change and why further the name was dropped. With XVN.com not resolvable, and the domain whois switching from the same gmail account to contact privacy, it can be inferred that the primary domain was stolen and the gmail contact info was lost.

I don't have any info on XVN or why it doesn't resolve but I will add it to my "to be investigated" list. However, the same research would have helped the buyer make the same choice and expect massive ammounts of long lost traffic to find a new home.