A few years back, Koala.com.au was purchased from a large domain investing company for at least $50,000 (rumour had it), by a large Australian mattress company that owns “Koala.com“.
Tomorrow, Thursday 16th November, 2023, something seems to have happened to have caused this premium valuable domain name to drop on the public drop auctions.
What do you think has happened?
If this is a massive mistake, what lessons can be learned?
They forgot to renew! Its a great 100% generic name. If they are smart they will bid the $50,000 max bid now before they lose it completely. Its at $30,000 and only 1 allowed bid increment left at $50,000
koala.com redirects to koala.com/en-au for local buyers, so I guess they just decided they wanted all traffic to go through the .com rather than using the .com.au? If they didn’t want the .com.au asset they could have given it to me rather than letting it drop though… 🙂
As we all saw today, the original company “Koala Sleep Pty Ltd” re-purchased their own domain name for $50,000.
This means, Koala Sleep accidentally forgot to renew their own “Koala.com.au” domain , and then it went to the public auction, and then they effectively RENEWED their own domain for $50,000 to gain control back over it.
And who profited from this $50,000 purchase?
The one-and-only Australian private company drop catcher profited 98% of this money for themselves… $49,992 approximately. auDA continues to allow them to run the monopoly of catching dropping Australian domain names. auDA enables this by not allowing any new Registrars or competition to enter the market. auDA have not approved a new Registrar for over 7 years – https://assets.com.au/drophero-com-au-cancels-domain-drop-catching-service/
What’s more interesting is that infamous DROP catching Co can show upcoming expired names up to 30 days ahead and again this was published too late for it to be published public and still renewed in the30 day renew grace period.
They seem to know nearly every trick … except their $250,000 crown.com.au loss, they where stabbed on by another Registrar and auDA ??
Only domains that are pending purge will be on the .au drop list, they don’t appear there during the 30 day expiration/grace period.
This would be nice to do. But there is no money to be made. A registrar is sending out email warning notices that the domain is expiring. The owner ignores the notices. There is no point in making it public sooner as the only one who can purchase it is the owner. More to be made if a name goes to auction than renewal. The Goal of the company is to make money so you will never see a public service list like this.
A public visible grace period list subverts the whois privacy by disclosing the domain expiry date. This would probably be against some auDA rule.
$50k twice, once as an end user in 2017, now paying $50k wholesale at a 24 hour expired domain auction with investors as underbidders
This implies an end user price tag / valuation of $150-200k, since the underbidder was $30k and very likely an investor
Kudos to the domain manager and company who weren’t afraid to rebuy, which implies human error at play in missing the renewal
A good question to ask the monopoly drop service – “Did you reach out to the Koala Mattress people and say to them *we are the only ones who can catch it for you, and there’s a $30,000 bid so far* – but how will we, the public, ever know if there even was a $30k bid? No one is governing their aftermarket auctions. They are a private company and answer to no one. And they are the only one. Years later, and still shocking.
Koala.com.au also had priority rights to koala.au. When koala.com.au dropped the token was deleted and the .net.au owner is now the proud owner of koala.au
Auda still has not processed the token renewals. Who knows maybe koala.net.au did not renew their token but because of the delay by auDA still got the direct koala.au.