If you register for free you get 10 results per search instead of 5. I know that still doesn't sound like a lot, but with sorting by date and price, both ascending and descending, you can actually get 40 results per search pretty quickly. And that's before filtering on things like Venue or Date Range, the permutations allow for hundreds of results if you want to put in the time. That's plenty for most casual users and the typical searches they'll be doing. You can still follow the daily results on NameBio Live or the Daily Market Report. We're still running auctions and pending deletes against the database and publishing those lists daily.
NameBio has been going for 16 years as a free service, and it still is free, it's just less free and has a little more friction. It's incredibly difficult to sell advertising in such a small industry, the companies that can afford to pay, well... everyone already knows about them and visits them daily so they don't advertise much. The newer services have no ad budgets. There isn't much middle ground. Go turn off your ad blocker and count the ads on Domaining.com to see how bad it has gotten. We lost half our advertisers this year already.
When I joined NameBio more than 8 years ago I decided not to change the free limits. When I launched paid memberships more than four years ago I actually increased the free limits if you register an account. The memberships were just so we could ship some feature requests that weren't realistic to give away for free to guest users. When we sold NameBio two years ago the buyers left it alone. This is despite all of us knowing that an ad-supported model doesn't make any sense for an extremely niche industry. That's why most services are paid, like DotDB, DomainIQ, Efty, Estibot, etc.
I've really tried to make a go at being primarily ad-supported, but it's time to pivot. Even though each year we serve more than 350,000 unique users, process many millions of searches, and have an average time on site of more than 48 minutes (which if you've ever owned a site you know is off the charts) it is still borderline impossible to attract advertisers. And only a few hundred people have memberships because we gave away such a crazy amount of functionality and data for free trying to attract eyeballs for advertisers. Most of them just really hate ads/captchas or wanted to support the project because we help them make money.
But that's not enough to keep things afloat, much less do all the things we want to do. Like finish our AI appraiser that we started 6 years ago and had to table, or an ML tool to estimate the probability of a retail sale for a given domain at various price points, or reviving our game and making it web-based with more modes, or creating educational content and doing deep-dives into the data for articles. It's not greed, we're just trying to get on solid footing and do more while ad revenue is hard to come by and affiliate revenue is basically gone thanks to Honey. But to do that we need to give away a more reasonable amount for free. Better than the alternative of being 100% paid. I sincerely hope it never comes to that.
Yes, Price Range and Domain Length are disabled for now, but that is unrelated. Those filters are constantly abused to get around limits, and are rarely used legitimately. I'm planning to replace them with presets that will still be usable but not prone to abuse. The same thing happened with the Date Range filter years ago, it used to be a from/to field, but within hours it was abused so insanely heavily that we had to replace it with presets. Hopefully this will be done in the next few weeks, it's high up on my list.
I'm sorry we had to adjust the limits, I know nobody likes getting less of something for free.
