discuss Why do people let all these great domains expire?

What you said. I remember reading about E.T. abducting a top domainer back in 2004. Also, life. Meaning, death, divorce, accidents where you're in the hospital, other serious things. Maybe they won the lotto.

Domainer2015 said:

...you see people let expire. It's no more than $15 to renew a domain, and I've seen some expired domains going for thousands

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Not everyone dropping them knows they're going for thousands afterwards on drop sites. And not every domain that goes for 'thousands' .. should have gone for that!

Life just happens sometimes. When I was in the military, several years back, I lost a series of very valuable domain names while in Afghanistan. I was trying to renew them but because my IP address was coming from Afghanistan, they were getting blocked. I got called out on a very extended mission and that's all she wrote. It was a costly lesson learned. So now, bare minimum 2 years on names with 5-10 on most valuable ones.

Could belong to individuals or businesses that closed up shop. It's always amazing to see LLL or premium keyword .coms expire. Ask someone in the real world if they would throw away something worth $xx,xxx in the trash and the answer is always no. But it happens daily with these virtual addresses we call domains... Just goes to show a lot of regular folks have no idea of the value of domain names

I'm also amazed when I see names on drop lists or closeout auctions that previously sold for good money.

Value of the domain is only what it means to someone, peoplewho are not domain investors and registered good names back many years might not be at all concerned about it now. that may be one of the reason, like a person who owns Taj electonics.. registered TAJE.com ( a cvcv.com) and since his business is closed, he now no more is interested in spending $10 to renew his domain...
Also people die, are hospitalized.. or heavily busy in other problems of life.. or might have used an email that they never check and didn't notice that the domain is about to expire.
there are many reasons for the Gems to expire

Few people understand the value of domain names.
Other than domainers, who knows for example that LLL.com are all taken and worth $$$$ minimum ?

I've had this happen to me. When you have domains spread across 20+ registrars, due to services like NameJet and Snapnames, it's really easy to lose track of a single domain until it's too late to recover it.

When you win domains on NameJet and Snapnames, you often have to wait 60 days before you can transfer them out of their partners' registrars, which makes consolidating them a very time consuming process because all of your domains have to be transferred at separate times. When you run multiple businesses, transferring domains from one registrar to another is not a huge priority. Then oversights happen.

It's really heartbreaking when it does happen, especially if you invested a lot of money in the domain, but it's a good reason to consolidate all of your domains to a single registrar as quickly as you can. It's a full-time job just to transfer them if you buy domains every day from NJ and SN. But it's a necessity.

For me it's consolidation. I might drop some good domains because I have had no luck in selling them, and so have had a change of heart about the domain. But for me, these are mostly non .com, or I am holding better .com domains, or I'm getting out of that segment. About 30% of the .com domains I drop get picked up by HugeDomains.

I have 2 simple answers for this question:
1. Life, Death, Profit, Loss etc. may lead people in different direction where they want to grow and not look back.
2. Not everyone is a domainer or not everyone is capable of understanding the true value of domain names. For Eg: Trust me I can't differentiate between real and fake diamonds yet. :D

I see the death as the biggest reason...

I myself dropped a few good names in my very early days
Sometimes people can't tell a good domain from a bad domain. So they drop the good along with the bad.
Or they are dumb, they think the shorter the better is the only rule that matters.
They don't understand why holidays.com is better than holid.com.

In fact most people are probably not even aware there is a market for domain name. They don't see domains as assets but disposable items. The reasoning is flawed but quite logic: why keep something that you can't sell or that nobody wants. Then it has no value.

sdsinc said:

They don't see domains as assets but disposable items.

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This is so true. When I tell family or friends what I do, they cock their head like a dog does when it hears a high pitched noise and ask "why?". Most dont know where a domain comes from, how you get one, that they can be investments, etc.

bashishtha said:

Trust me I can't differentiate between real and fake diamonds yet. :D

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Nice comparison! The thing is when you buy real diamonds, as the owner, you know their value. And as domain owner (who is not a Namepro ) what you drop - is just $15 (or so)... not much to loose.

Another things that I can see:

The Company X does not pay webmaster and he drops the domain. That you can see with domains which have a lot of traffic: the charity foundations attract a lot of traffic, but do not have money to pay their webmaster

And... young age of the domain owner. Somehow young people tend to forget the due dates

I believe death is one of the biggest reasons. Believe it or not, many people pass WITHOUT leaving their registrar credentials and portfolio details behind.

Enfant said:

Another things that I can see:

The Company X does not pay webmaster and he drops the domain.

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Indeed, many domains are lost due to incompetence, or because the 'webmaster' vanished and nobody has the access codes.

when I was much younger, I lost a few just due to negligence, I thought I had them on auto renew and didn't and just never bothered to check until it was too late. I also lost my very first name kickazzstuff.com when I was 17 because my dad wouldn't let me renew it on his card. (he thought it was a waste of time and money)

@Grego85 - Just because it's now owned by Marchex, doesn't make kickazzstuff.com a valuable domain.

stub said:

@Grego85 - Just because it's now owned by Marchex, doesn't make kickazzstuff.com a valuable domain.

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I know, but it was valuable to me

Our life is also Expiring, we can"t renew it after that ..:D

Did my first snipe today just a while ago, I wont use drop catch or back order.
Reason is I know the big guys are breaking the icann rules.
I got hit once for a back order and never got the domain or my money back with gd. I lost one domain because sedo wanted too much for the dot com my net I let drop and went for the new .me (then) immediately sedo had it for 7.5k along with the .com for 70k. I wonder how many of the big money domains were actually snatched by the registrars themselves and that is illegal. We know they are doing it!
The net is full of scams and drop catch is a waste of money. You will end up in a bidding war that only the registrars win on. Those domains are actually 18 cents each with icann!
Any way suffice to say I got a real good one a while ago I just waited for the deletion to go through and BAM I had it Yes it took a lot patience over 24 hrs for a diamond in the rough. and I got it for discount reg fee!

which Domain?...

namecheap

Poop Breath said:

namecheap

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How did I miss that one?