auctions GoDaddy Expired Auctions can be tricked

[Furquan]

Twitter user and Chinese domain investor posted that Godaddy Auctions allows people to use two bidder accounts on the same name and a lot of people are using it for tricking the auctions.
 

https://twitter.com/x/status/1678228128194256896

 

 

[scithe]

3270․com rolled back from $9,988 to $1,165. Nice deal, congrats to the buyer

It sucks that this is still happening!

 

[D Haynes]

With all the ways they're trying to squeeze every last cent from their customers you'd thing they'd be at least a bit bothered about the money they're potentially hemorrhaging from the auction platform.

 

[phaethon]

I would not even pay $1165 for a random number lol

 

[DomainRecap]

It's quite amusing that GoDaddy is facing an investor revolt for not making enough profit, so they are running around like idiots firing everyone, monetizing their entire infrastructure, and raising prices...

Yet they allow this obvious flaw in the auction system (that is being rampantly abused) to cost them millions of dollars a year. I'm CEO there and I have that loophole closed years ago. Pure profit!

GoDaddy is literally the blind leading the blind.

 

[DomainRecap]

Sure they can, they just pay to renew it. Even if 100% of them get no bids in the re-auction, I'm pretty sure they can swing $65 a day. And within a few weeks it'll stop happening entirely because it will be impossible to game.

Exactly, and other expired domain sellers do this, especially with higher-priced domains so it's hardly anything new, except for GoDaddy apparently.

At the very least, any auction reaching 4-figures that the high bidder reneges on should be automatically renewed and auctioned a second time.

I remember there was a nice 3-letter .COM that got auctioned off at a huge price, and then some Chinese twitter account bragged about actually paying a fraction of the price (due to this blatant loophole) so GD already lost 6-figures on that one alone - can they not afford to pay for a renewal on an LLL.com that would resell for hundreds of thousands of dollars?

Do the math.

 

[zomainhacks]

It's quite amusing that GoDaddy is facing an investor revolt for not making enough profit

Do you have articles on it to share?

 

[DomainRecap]

Do you have articles on it to share?

The news has been all over and I'm not sure how you missed it but through late-2023 and 2024, there have been multiple "letters to the CEO of GoDaddy" along with press releases advising that:

"GoDaddy needs to cut more jobs, reduce the tech budget, and address why it is falling short of financial targets outlined at its shareholder day in 2022, or the board should consider exploring a sale of the business."

https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/14/acvitist_investor_to_godaddy_cuts/

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/starboard-delivers-letter-to-godaddy-302049311.html

As these directly threaten the employment of virtually all GD executives, it's certainly no coincidence that GD has been cutting jobs, raising prices, closing down business units, and monetizing virtually everything in 2024...

 

[scithe]

that article in The Register is 6 months old and in the last six months the stock has climbed almost 50%. Interesting.

 

[DomainRecap]

that article in The Register is 6 months old and in the last six months the stock has climbed almost 50%. Interesting.

That's mostly because GD needed some quick cash to hit targets and sold off a pile of their top Namefind investment domains, in addition to massive employee layoffs and other cost-cutting measures. Most investors just look at the balance sheet and other financial metrics and don't often deep-dive to figure out where it all comes from.

GoDaddy's numbers do look better, but this type of strategy is not sustainable. At a certain point they will run out of workers to fire, costs to cut, prices to raise, and premium Namefind domains to sell.