On May 18, 2015 I published an article on some investigation research that I did on eNom domain names that IMO contained warehoused domains based on whois records with many being listed on a Afternic.com marketplace member page “eNom” page.
I guess saying “some” is an understatement because there were 204,036 domains listed on the page and climbing daily at the time!
Today, I tried visiting the Afternic member page “enom” using the URL structure https://www.afternic.com/enom where all the domains were listed and poof, gone!
Now it makes me feel like they are trying to hide something…? again, warehousing domain names isn’t illegal and eNom has every right to list domain names for sale, own domain names etc. so why remove the member page listing shortly after my article? May be a coincidence.
To refresh your memory of what it looked like a couple days ago:
To be clear, they didn’t “remove” all the domain name listings from Afternic, they simply removed the user / member page “eNom” which allows one to see all domain names listed by an Afternic member. If you visit the domain name IdeoMarketing.com using the domain structure URL https://www.afternic.com/domain/ideomarketing.com that still is active, but you no longer can “view sellers listings” or go directly to the eNom sellers page. All this did IMO was make it harder to track all the domains they own and are selling and may be the reason behind the move.
You can visit any Afternic “member” page to see domains listed by them by visiting Afternic.com/username . Clearly you have to know the members user name and the option must be turned on in order to see it. A member can hide data by visiting the My Account / Account Settings / Privacy / Edit / Nothing – Hide My Profile in an Afternic account.
Rightside has disclosed multiple times that it has about 300k domain names and a lot of them come from the expired domain name stream. That said, I suspect they’d prefer people to not see the entire list, which is why the Afternic page was removed.
Andrew, since they are selling the domains, why wouldn’t they want them to be seen? Entire list or not?
Did you notice any questionable domain names in the portfolio? I suspect there are some, and they’d rather not have people see these.
There could also be a competitive reason, such as not wanting other people to see what kinds of domains they’re getting and how they’re pricing them.
BTW, great research (as always) on your first post about this.
This might be a reason there can’t be a full download of domain portfolios at Afternic. The endless scrolling is impossible to use for more than 100 domains.
Yep, I gave up on the Marchex portfolio. Too much work on Afternic.
Every time I email afternic I get the same lazy guy who emails back like 5 days later with a price. Anyone have a decent person @aft or GD that you all work with.
Donny, you can work with Rich Green at Afternic to buy domains.