I discovered yesterday that some GoDaddy Auctions expired domain names are using RookMedia.net domain parking pages instead of the standard GoDaddy parking pages displaying that the domain expired and is pending renewal or deletion.
It appears that about 6-10 days after expiring, some domains are changing DNS to ns100.rookdns.com and ns99.rookdns.com and using the parking service provided by RookMedia.net.
Why they are doing this is the real interesting question? Is it a money thing? Are they interested in Rook Media? Is Rook Media a better option than parking with-in at GoDaddy? Was this done by some kind of mistake?
A lot of questions remain as to why GoDaddy is parking some expired domain names with RookMedia.net and I reached out to Paul Nicks who runs GoDaddy Auctions and he wasn’t even aware of it and noted they were not doing any testing, but was going to look into it.
I discovered this on the expired domain auction for the domain name Overstretched.com while checking whois on it and took some screen shots:
I purchased the domain Overstretched.com just to see what would happen and the transaction was smooth so far. I wondered if maybe the past owner renewed the domain and the reason for the dns change, but I was able to complete the transaction. Another expired domain that is currently on auction is Huskily.com, and that domain is also using Rook Media for domain parking. The parking pages look like the following:
It’s a little interesting that GoDaddy isn’t linking TO the expired auction and also no mention that the domain is expired as they had in the past, because they focused on getting past owners to renew. I’m sure this is simply related to the testing process or whatever the reason behind them using Rook Media for some expired domain names or whoever is changing DNS.
I didn’t run a huge scan but I did check more domains and ran into many, so this isn’t just a couple domains.
It will be interesting to hear what Paul finds, partly because he wasn’t even aware of it and the discovery is pretty interesting in general. I will update when I hear back from him.
Hey Jamie, domain owners are allowed to reset their DNS after we switch it to our parked servers post-expiration. That’s what happened with your examples, they were simply moved back to Rook (from GD parking) post expiration but still during the redemption period.
-Paul
Thanks for the info Paul. I find it a bit odd though. Overstretched.com for an example was never on RookDNS prior that I seen. It was parked with InternetTraffic.com for years (11/4/2011 to 1/20/2015) until it expired 1/18/2015. By 1/28/2015 it switched to RookDNS.com . This is likely one domain owner who has done his/her homework.
In the end, I learned something new and DotWeekly readers as well.
I made arookmedia for one of my domains which was getting good traffic .
And with rookmedia,I made some 240$ in the first month,,not with any invalid clicks,
and clicks were surprisingly low too.
One day when Iogged in,they said I am banned,neither they sent me any email so we can talk,nor did he sent any warning or gave my money..
In the end,rookmedia suddenly closed my account without any email or anything,so I cannot contact them,and took my240$