In what can only be described as beautiful music to the ears of Australian domain investors and entrepreneurs, Assets Australia has been given the scoop that DropCatcher.com.au (V1) has officially launched!
Cam Bell (who has over 17 years working in the Australian domain name industry) and his hard working team have just brought a much-needed new Drop Catcher to the Australian domain name industry. You can now bid on dropping and expiring domain names every day at DropCatcher.com.au(.)
Ed and I were lucky enough to be asked (well, we begged) to be chosen as “beta testers” for the new Drop Catcher over the past few months and we offered various opinions to make the best drop catcher we thought the community would love. I can personally say I love the new platform and use it exclusively to bid and catch dropping domain names for myself and my clients.
As a special introductory offer for Assets Australia readers, DropCatcher has reduced its annual signup fee from $99 to only $1, for a limited time, so be sure to go and sign up now.
Also, you’ll be pleased to know it’s only a minimum $20 bid to win a dropping or expiring domain name and your bid can be placed as a “proxy” bid, meaning, if you place a bid for $100 as your “proxy”, if no one else makes a bid for the domain, the system will only charge you the minimum $20 for the domain. How’s that for fair!? Also, what you bid is what you pay, so GST is included and there’s no other fees.
Once a domain has 2 bidders or more, the bid becomes public and you get to watch the action, as long as you’re logged in. That’s full transparency on bids when there are 2 or more bids on a particular domain.
DropCatcher has also implemented an awesome “Domain Alerts” tool, so you can be notified when any of your favourite keyword domains appear on the daily drop list via email
All the freshly non-contested .au Direct domains that become available every day are also available to buy every day on the new platform.
Sign up to DropCatcher.com.au today (for $1 limited time), be sure to “watch” some of your brand keywords, and provide your feedback to Cam Bell and his team to make DropCatcher (V1) even better over the coming months.
Start watching, backordering and buying domain names to protect your online brand.
Thanks Rob, to you and Ed for the work you’ve done testing it for me over the last few months.
I’m quite proud of this first version of the site and I highly encourage all who check it out to let me know directly if you have any issues or suggestions. Of note is something you mentioned; I also include in this daily list any .AU that has become immediately able to be registered too and I’m seeing a few of those getting snapped up on our platform already. Exciting times!
The next step is to get a formal Registrar Accreditation, which I continue to work on and is proving to be quite difficult with auDA. Not from a technical viewpoint, of which I have already passed most of the hurdles, but more from auDA’s new Registrar Application rules. If anyone has experience getting auDA to actually co-operate, communicate and can help me, please get in touch.
Awesome. Thanks. Signed up!
Am I reading this right that this is finally going back to the good old days of auctions where there is actual bidding like on eBay, right up to the death knock without being forced into nominating ridiculous multiples? Now THAT does sound enticing. 🙂
I guess the next unknown is how fast are the servers in actually grabbing the domain name compared to those owned by drop? Would be interesting to see an update to this article in a few weeks to show conversions of successful captures from auctions and compare them to Drop.
And lastly, what valuation tool is being used? Giving the same valuation to both the .com.au and .au of the same name seems a little wanky, at best extremely hopeful, but realistically quite far fetched. Especially given previous articles on here showing a takeup expectation of .au to be a max of 10%. (example: reviewing today I can see miscellaneous.com.au and miscellaneous.au both valued equally at $24,179)
But regardless of the above, congrats Cam on finally getting this over the line. I know how patient you needed to be to get here and I do wish you much success! I will certainly be one of your customers.
Hey Rudy,
The first iteration of DropCatcher does not yet have its own direct Registrar accreditation, so its performance is not going to be at its full potential until that occurs.
DropCatcher is definitely the place to be if you want to get a non-contested domain at the best price as what you bid is what you pay, just $20 min!
My team and I have worked hard to build the tech and it’s complete and ready to go, as you can see, so as soon as auDA approve their last few tick boxes I’m confident we’ll be competitive against other existing services that provide drop catching.
As for the valuations, they come from Estibot. As there’s no real data on .AU’s yet we’re just using the same valuation for both. As the market matures and we see the kinds of prices .AU’s are going for, we’ll adjust our system to value them more accurately.
Cheers!
Can I suggest you make the .au a $0 value for now (just for your own credibility)? Better to say nothing that say a figure you know is going to mocked and be wildly inaccurate. For me personally, I would rather not even see them listed. Waste of time. Anything worthwhile will be registered by whoever has priority by September 2022 and there won’t be anything of value in the drops until at the earliest September 2023 when a tiny percentage of those people MAY let their au drop after having it registered for a year. Until then, it’s literally just a visual distraction.
And can you get Aussie search volumes please? You’re an Aussie domain catcher selling Aussie domains and only Aussie domains. It makes no sense to show international search and CPC numbers.
Just trying to be helpful. 🙂
By the number of Registrations of .au Direct it sure is looking like they’re worth $0 at the moment!
Hats off to you and your team Cam for this new Drop Catcher. Sure it’s not a leading drop catcher yet, but the more people who get behind it and support it, I’m sure the better it will become. It’s looking truly WORLD CLASS with the best user interface and console panel I’ve seen anywhere in the world.
auDA dragging their feet in giving you full Registrar status, after this length of time and now that you’ve revealed the quality of your product, seems… creepy.
I wonder how many of the auDA Board Members are aware of what looks to be a few people at auDA holding back your Registrar Application?
Finalllly!!!! epic just signed up
Strange, but, the discount code for $1 isn’t showing up for me?
Hi Trev,
When I signed up the checkout automatically gave me this code – 0K8NWRDUD2 – so I could sign up for $1. Hopefully it will work for you too?
Totally agree Rob,
The new Drop Catcher platform is great and I am grateful to Cam for letting us in on the Beta test phase.
Exciting to have a new player in the Australian Domain Industry.
Everyone should sign up for it, it’s a No Brainer for AU$1.
Very good works lads you can count on my support. $20 per domain bargain. Not sure I’ll be buying any DOT.AU though
I feel bad for you and your team Cam, clearly just trying to do the right thing and get a competitive Drop Catcher up and running with all your experience.
auDA on it’s own website blog wrote this in 2010:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130601161946/https://blog.auda.org.au/2010/11/08/domain-drops-and-the-process/
“A Drop Catcher improves your chances of picking up a domain name but does not guarantee it as there could be SEVERAL DOMAIN CATCHERS COMPETING…”
For 16 months now, and counting, auDA have allowed a monopoly on deleted and expiring domain names to be caught by a single company, when other drop catcher services are willing to compete, but are being seemingly moth-balled.
It’s impossible for a new drop catcher to compete when auDA haven’t signed up any new Registrars since 2016. Only Registrars have access to an Afilias Registry connection, and it’s this Registry connection that is needed to ensure a drop catcher can be competitive in catching a dropping domain name transparently for a fair price for Australian businesses.
Many questions need to be raised about what auDA is doing here and something needs to be done.
Also…
In 2011, auDA convened the Secondary Market Working Group to examine the operation of the .au secondary market and identify any points of market failure.
The SMWG (convened by auDA) recommended the following:
“Because not all registrars offer drop catching services, auDA has not listed the ones that do provide the service on its website, due to a concern that it may appear as though auDA is promoting some registrars over others.”
This is quoted from Page 7 of this document on the auDA website archive.
It seems that auDA were concerned at the time to not promote any other registrar over another in terms of drop catching services…
Meanwhile, 10 years later, they are clearly allowing a drop catching monopoly to exist for over 16 months now, when competitors like DropCatcher.com.au are clearly ready and willing to compete but are being ignored.
When will something be done?
Good stuff!
It is such a shame that other platforms dont publish auction results.
Numerous .com.au domains have gone for five figures this year and none have been reported.
Rob, your Top Sales list could be updated with some of the sales reported at https://dnj.com.au/what-is-a-com-au-domain-name-worth/ …
also Dash.com.au went for $20,000 usd or circa $28k aud in Feb on Sedo.
I notice DNJ and the new PROFIT websites both use a lot of the sales I reported on my other sites over the last few years. It’s good for the community that we get all these sales out there. They’re both great looking sites with original articles too. But all the newest best sales will always appear on this site first. You know it.
Okay, great, will check out Dash.com.au and update the Top Sales on here soon.
In other news… Here comes the new DropCatcher Aftermarket. Exciting stuff! I’ve got a few names on there and Cam and his team have done a great job and it’s been easy dealing with them. 4 top domain investors are launching their domains or sale over there (DropCatcher.com.au) so make sure you guys support Cam’s new site if you want it to keep going! Me and my silly soapbox can only do so much!