Don't you think this is being overzealous?
Sedo reports completed auctions weekly, and NameJet reports completed auctions monthly, and both of those are only for sales $2k+. Literally no other venue reports completed auctions to us. If we only reported what was spoon-fed to us we would only be adding a couple hundred sales a week like DNJournal, you'd only ever hear about the high end of the market, and there would only be two venues plus whoever reported private sales. This is not a transparent industry and we do the best we can.
That means we have to go out and gather the data ourselves. But the caveat is that in many cases it isn't possible to know if an auction completed successfully. There are a few exceptions, for example when DropCatch re-auctions a domain we can know the original auction didn't complete and remove it. We used to be able to capture GoDaddy rollbacks. BuyDomains only reports completed sales on their homepage but they only report a tiny percent. Private reports are verified. But the rest is unknown.
All that said (and I've said all that multiple times on NamePros), from what we've observed at DropCatch and GoDaddy, more than 98% of auctions complete successfully. So I'm still comfortable reporting auctions even if there is no mechanism by which we can confirm successful completion, since almost all of them complete successfully anyway. I'm not going to throw the baby out with the bath water.
And looking at the WHOIS as others have suggested is not feasible. It would require multiple WHOIS history records per domain to verify anything, which would cost significantly more than NameBio even earns. And in a post GDPR world it wouldn't really help, and even before that law there was always the issue of WHOIS privacy before and/or after the auction. We would only be able to confirm a small percent of the auctions, the rest would get trashed even though they most likely completed successfully, and we'd spend an absolute fortune on DomainTools API calls making the database less helpful.
I put in a request to Dynadot yesterday to get a feed of only completed auctions, I don't know if they'll be able or willing to help though. If they don't, and these Uni auctions continue to fall through at an extremely high rate, we're just going to have to remove tracking of Dynadot auctions and remove all of their results since the Uni deal started. But I'm not going to exclude all the other venues that have very high completion rates, that would be silly and serve nobody.
As for the merits of tracking wholesale auctions in the first place, I won't really debate that. Markets like this (and Real Estate) can't function well without knowing what similar items have sold for. Comparable sales bring both efficiency and liquidity to a market. Without them prices would be all over the place, nobody would be confident that what they were paying is reasonable, so less deals would happen.
That's why in the US sales of residential Real Estate are a matter of public record by law. And why companies like CoStar (I used to work there) exist for commercial Real Estate. I've lived in Europe for a long time and the country I live in has nothing similar, and you should see the listings for homes. It's laughable, the prices are all over the place and people are just making it up as they go. You'll see one house listed for 150k EUR and a very similar house in the same neighborhood listed for 250k EUR, just because nobody can figure out what anything is worth as they don't know what anything actually sold for.
So no, we're not going to stop tracking the wholesale market. End users will very rarely find out what you paid, and even if they do it doesn't matter. If you buy a Picasso at a yard sale for $100 and your "score" is all over the national news, do you really think you're going to have a problem selling it for millions? It doesn't matter what you paid, it matters what it is worth. A buyer who tries to use knowledge of what you paid against you to the point that negotiations break down, wasn't going to pay your price anyway. Any halfway decent negotiator can deal with this very rare situation.
And let's not forget that it was our tracking of the wholesale market that led to the exposure of the shill bidding scandal at NameJet, and I spent countless hours digging through the data to make those connections even though it didn't affect me. It concerns me when people argue against transparency.
The real problem here is that quite a few venues have built a business around auctioning items they can't guarantee delivery on, just to make their processes easier and/or cheaper for them. They're not going to stop until you speak with your wallet, blaming the people trying to bring transparency certainly won't help.
Could you imagine a house getting auctioned off because the owner was late on a single mortgage payment, and then the auction getting cancelled because they paid within the grace period? Nobody would put up with that nonsense, especially if the winner had to pay before finding out whether or not he'd actually receive the title. I'm not sure why the domain industry puts up with it