Namebio database sources

[Bob Hawkes]

There are many reasons we don't track NamePros auctions:

A forum marketplace is unstructured, thus it is very difficult to scrape. People masking domains in a variety of creative ways. People writing bids like "a grand" or "one hundo" would be fun to deal with. Bids getting cancelled and prices rolled back, or users correcting their bids in subsequent posts. Portfolio auctions getting bids independently or as a lot. People saying "Sold at BIN" but it might be hard to extract the BIN from the original post. Weird end time rules like "912 minutes after the last bid" making it difficult to know when it is actually over. Stuff like that. It's hard for a bot to be accurate without structure...

Thanks for the excellent detailed answer to the OP question, @Michael. Is there a location where Namebio show which sources are automatically part of Namebio database? I take it that Undeveloped and Efty sales are only reported if the seller reports them individually with documentation? Whereas are all Sedo and GD sales above the $100 limit reported? I'm not asking for a long individual answer, just a link to a site that lists the sources, if one exists.

Thank you, and thank you for providing such an awesome tool, that is even better now that statistics is included! We are indeed fortunate that you provide this wonderful resource to the community.

Bob

 

[Michael]

Thanks for the excellent detailed answer to the OP question, @Michael. Is there a location where Namebio show which sources are automatically part of Namebio database? I take it that Undeveloped and Efty sales are only reported if the seller reports them individually with documentation? Whereas are all Sedo and GD sales above the $100 limit reported? I'm not asking for a long individual answer, just a link to a site that lists the sources, if one exists.

Thank you, and thank you for providing such an awesome tool, that is even better now that statistics is included! We are indeed fortunate that you provide this wonderful resource to the community.

Bob

Below are the venues we track automatically, along with some explanation. All other venues come from manual reports or friends giving us data dumps.

4.CN - Everything they report in the closed auctions feed, which as far as I know is everything. Although it has slowed down a lot so I wonder if they're holding back.

Bido - Should include everything.

BuyDomains - Only tracking what streams across their homepage, which is probably a tiny percent.

DropCatch - All auctions, both expired and private sellers.

Dynadot - All expired auctions.

Fabulous - All sales they report in their feed, which is only $1k+.

Flippa - All auctions and negotiated sales, unless one of the parties paid Flippa for privacy before midnight of the day the deal was reached or auction closed. They no longer report cancelled auctions to us, but we're working on adding functionality to automatically go back and see which ones failed to complete so we can remove them. Hopefully that'll be running in the next few weeks for this venue.

GoDaddy - Only expired auctions, but it should be all of them. The way we get this data doesn't show if public auctions met reserve or not, or even if they had a reserve, so we can't include them. The only other way to get the results of their public auctions would require hammering their server, which we won't do. I try to be respectful of the venues and keep as light of a footprint as possible.

NameJet - Requires that we place in excess of 50k back orders per year. That means we don't get all of their sales but we do track a very high percent of them. Also at the end of each month they report all sales $2k+ to us. Friends will also occasionally export their entire auction history and send it to us, for example we just recently added 13,499 missed NameJet sales over the past decade, although most were from 2012 or earlier, thanks to the help of one individual.

Park.io - Tracking all auctions, and they also report privately negotiated sales as well.

Sedo - We track their auctions ourselves. We also pull hourly from their RSS feed of brokered sales, but this is only a small percentage of what they're selling privately from what I understand. They also send us a spreadsheet every week of all sales $2k+. But I think we're just scratching the surface of what Sedo is doing because quantity-wise most of their sales are under $2k.

We do not track SnapNames because you have to back order to follow the results, and they don't show how many back orders there are, so we can't safely jump in without spending a fortune. A few friends who are extremely active on Snap give us data dumps a few times a year, and we're about to get a huge amount of data for them from one of the most active bidders on the platform.

All other sales like Uniregistry, Undeveloped, Efty, brokers, etc. are manually reported.

We have been tracking sales below $100 at these venues for a few years now and we have hundreds and hundreds of thousands in the database. But we don't publish them at this time, and we're still considering whether or not we will in the future.

It is natural for wholesale buyers (whether it is NamePros or some marketplace selling expiring domains for example) to wish their purchases NOT be shown anywhere. So lack of NameBio reports on those sales is something NP buyers can only appreciate. NameBio is doing good job, no doubts, but it is hard to separate enduser sales from domainer purchases even if they tried to. Which they do not try, by design...

It's not by design, and we would absolutely like to be able to distinguish between the two. It's something we've been thinking a lot about, but it is surprisingly difficult to do, especially at mixed venues like Sedo. It's part of the reason we made our game, for example if all the best players guess too low on a Sedo sale it is pretty safe to say it was retail. That and some statistical analysis should make it possible, but we haven't gotten around to it yet due to other priorities. It's on our wish-list though.

Personally, I usually just sort by price (ascending to find wholesale and descending to find retail), or select only certain venues (GoDaddy, Flippa, NameJet, SnapNames, Park.io, etc. for wholesale) when I need to distinguish between the two. It's not perfect but does a decent job, which is why this isn't a higher priority.

Thanks to both of you for the kind words

 

[Bob Hawkes]

What an incredibly detailed report, @Michael ! All of us have a much better picture of what is in, and what limitations in terms of what is reported go with some of the sources. I did not realize that so many of the Sedo sales under $2k will not be reported, for example.

So am I correct that in general registry sales of premium ngTLDs are not reported unless done so privately?

I had not realized that you have tracked, but not yet reported, sales under $100. Personally, I would love to see these in the reported database.

I guess for Efty it will always be up to each person what is reported or not by the nature of that service.

It would be so good if the Undeveloped and Uniregistry sales could be included, except where privacy requests are in place re a sale. Has thought been given to a possible mechanism for reporting Undeveloped sales to Namebio, @Undeveloped ?

Thanks once more, both for this superb answer and for all that you do for the domain name investing field.

Bob

 

[Doron Vermaat]

All other sales like Uniregistry, Undeveloped, Efty, brokers, etc. are manually reported.

I would like to add that Efty, the entity, never reports sales (automatically or manually) for the sole reason we do not have access to our customer's data. This way all Efty users that prefer to keep their sales private can rest assured their data is their data only and will never be shared unless they decide to do so themselves. Any public reported sales through the Efty platform that you can find on NameBio, DNjournal or here on NP have been reported by the sellers themselves.

 

[Michael]

So am I correct that in general registry sales of premium ngTLDs are not reported unless done so privately?

The registries that have reported premium sales in the past are .TOP, .GLOBAL, .NYC, Rightside (.GAMES, .LIVE, .MARKET, .NEWS and many others), StartingDot (.BIO, .ARCHI, .SKI), and .CLUB. However none of them do it very consistently for some reason.

We do get some private sellers reporting new gTLD sales, but most of them like to keep their sales quiet. Some venues we track do get some new gTLDs running through them but this doesn't happen much.

I would like to add that Efty, the entity, never reports sales (automatically or manually) for the sole reason we do not have access to our customer's data. This way all Efty users that prefer to keep their sales private can rest assured their data is their data only and will never be shared unless they decide to do so themselves. Any public reported sales through the Efty platform that you can find on NameBio, DNjournal or here on NP have been reported by the sellers themselves.

Sorry, I should have made that more clear. When I said the other venues are manually reported I meant by a party to the transaction not the venue, with the exception of Uniregistry who does report to us once a year.

 

[easywebdomains.net]

Thank you @Michael for the information on where and how you track domain sales. Very useful to know.

I recognise that this is an old thread, but I wanted to point out to anyone reading it that the sub $100 sales are now available on NameBio with a Domainer or Business Membership level.

 

[NameGroove]

The registries that have reported premium sales in the past are .TOP, .GLOBAL, .NYC, Rightside (.GAMES, .LIVE, .MARKET, .NEWS and many others), StartingDot (.BIO, .ARCHI, .SKI), and .CLUB. However none of them do it very consistently for some reason.

We do get some private sellers reporting new gTLD sales, but most of them like to keep their sales quiet. Some venues we track do get some new gTLDs running through them but this doesn't happen much.


Sorry, I should have made that more clear. When I said the other venues are manually reported I meant by a party to the transaction not the venue, with the exception of Uniregistry who does report to us once a year.

If I decided to report my private sales do you have any sort of "rewards" offer whereby I would get access to your fee based membership for free for some period of time? Sort of an incentive to post/list sort of thing?