Welcome to the hotel california
Such a lovely place
Such a lovely face
Plenty of room at the hotel california
Any time of year, you can find it here
(Eagles – Hotel California)
GamblingInvest.com’s parent company recently acquired the gambling domains portfolio I put together in the last 2-3 years. But the story I want to tell you starts with some domains that are not related to gambling.
As part of the deal to sell the majority of BookmakersReview.com I became partner in a company that is currently involved in the development of a number of sports news aggregators, a soccer video site as well as directories for the travel and financial industries. On top of the domains currently under development the company owns a portfolio with hundreds of other domains, hence we decided to list around 100 of them for sale on Sedo.
For those of you who don’t know, Sedo is the world’s leading domain aftermarket and one of the most popular domain parking services.
Trying to list the domains on my personal account, we found out that about 10 out of 100 couldn’t be listed because according to Sedo they were owned by someone else. Sedo went on to tell us how to claim ownership of the domains and at this time I simply thought that it was normal that some domains that had been listed at Sedo before had changed owners.
But then I went on to check if Sedo had among its listing any of the 2,500 .com and .net domains Domain Invest bought from me and my partners (and that are going up for sale exclusively at GamblingInvest.com). To my surprise I found out that 75 of them (or 3%) were listed for sale at Sedo.
At this point, I asked Sedo what was the procedure to remove my domains from their marketplace,
the following are the two options I was given:
1.List the domains in your Sedo account and when we verify ownership the domains will be automatically deleted from the old account.
2.Tell us the domain names and we will remove them from the old account then you can add the domains to your account afterwards.
As you can see both options happen to have the Sedo marketplace as the final ending. For Sedo it’s just a matter of listing the domains under the right owner.
What about a third option? Can I sell my domains somewhere else?
Sedo answered: “Of course. As long as you provide us a screen shot or an invoice that can show us that you are the right owner!”
Basically a company as big as Sedo and that has all kind of optimizations for domain parking, doesn’t think is necessary to automatically remove domains from their marketplace
following a sale on Sedo
after a change of ownership
after a change of nameservers
after a domain expires
The result of this convenient oversight at Sedo is that domain owners have to opt out from the service Sedo provides because some time in the past, a former owner listed the domain with them.
Anyway, I provided Sedo proofs that Domain Invest Ltd owned the domains and asked them to remove the domains from the marketplace.
Guess what happened?
Sedo went on to add the domains to my personal account and while for some of them asked again to prove the ownership, it basically made sure the domains will remain listed on Sedo marketplace since the domains are not owned by myself but by Domain Invest Ltd as I had already proved to them.
While 3% of 2,500 compared to the several hundreds thousands domains listed on Sedo may not be statistically relevant, a quick investigation revealed that Sedo doesn’t automatically remove from its marketplace domains that are sold through their service nor it has updated its listings for domains who have expired or dropped for well over two years (as I’ve found a domain I bought through a backdropping service over 2 years ago still listed for sale by Sedo probably under the previous owner). I personally wouldn’t be surprised if as much as 10% of Sedo listings are not really available for purchase because they changed owner, have expired or in the meantime have been developed by someone who’s not aware Sedo has the domain listed under who knows who.
relax, said the night man
We are programmed to receive.
You can checkout any time you like,
But you can never leave!
(Eagles – Hotel California)
UPDATE 20-10-2009: A week and three e-mails later, Sedo.com finally removed our domains from their marketplace. Not being a premium customer nor a high-profile domainer I don’t expect Sedo to start removing expired or sold domains in real time. Hence next time when you make an offer that is not too far from the asking price and you get absolutely no answer through Sedo, you may want to check whether the domain had recently changed owner…
