Did the vultures come in and take my meal without me looking?

[thevoyager]

Currently in the middle of setting up a new business, big intentions, world changing ideas etc.

I check the usual registrars for the .com - I checked yesterday and amazingly the .com was available and I think ranged from $3 to $5 or so.

Today I checked again and the .com had suddenly been pumped up to $1000! WTH!?

I feel sick to the core on many levels knowing that their are either

1. Domain suppliers who behave like this, maybe using insider information or cookies
2. Or people who somehow actively monitor what domains are being searchd and then snap them up for a penny and sell for thousands...

Can someone explain what has happened here? I am honestly so pissed off, it could have been the difference between a multi-million pound company, and not.

 

[winst]

Google and Registrars know more about you than you realize.

Your search history, website visits across all your devices, and even parts of your casual conversations may be recorded and fed into AI to predict your intentions.

Sometimes the vultures' strategies may backfire:

I was hired as a CTO for a small startup. The company did not have the money to acquire a one-word .com domain name from a well-known domain investor, while I felt the mid-4 figures price was reasonable at the time. Fast-forward 1 year later, the domain name was "sold" to someone for 5 figures, and then this person contacted me directly to offer his help to "acquire" the domain name for the company. I don't know if the transaction was "real" but all that work for nothing: the startup did not get enough traction, and while it did not go under, it never received additional funding and I left after a few years.

 

[MadAboutDomains]

What is the best site to use away from these corporate canibals?

l0000l you're literally on a domainer forum...!! If you mean how do you avoid people that register domains for profit then you're in the wrong corner of the internet.

 

[SCP Foundation]

The wholesale price of .COM is $8.97 a year. Where was the .COM priced at $3 to $5?

If that was the case, was it not worth a few bucks to register such a world changing idea at the time?


Who knows what happened without specifics.

It is possible the domain was already registered and there was some glitch showing it was available.

It is possible someone just registered the domain. There are 160M+ .com and billions of people on Earth, it is not implausible that someone else registered a domain.

On a side note, even $1,000 seems like a steal for a future multi-million pound company.

Brad

cosmotown does a discount they sell .com at 4$