Thread

How would you feel if you woke up one morning, opened up your laptop or paper (for those of us who still live in an analog world), and saw that someone is advertising your primary web domain for sale?

Yep, I’ll bet you didn’t even know your domain was for sale did you?

And not only did you not know that your main domain was for sale, someone has published a full color ad for your website and is already accepting bids on your domain.

Check out this Sample Ad, and note the little ad right under the picture of the website.

“Make an offer to buy this domain”. See it there? You can click on it and for about $20 US, you can make a qualified bid on the domain.

Now just for fun, search for your own main domain, you know, the one that all your branding and reputation as a business is based on. The odds our your domain is for sale too. Cool huh?

Not all domains get this kind of ad on their page; google.com doesn’t, but oreilly.com does. I guess Google’s legal team is bigger than Oreilly’s maybe. Just a wild guess.

I would tell you how I really feel about this practice, but I’m worried that the word censoring filter would be working overtime just to keep up with me.

wowzer

It doesn’t say anywhere that the domains are in fact for sale. Quite the opposite—the embedded ad links to a service (using the word advisedly) of Network Solutions, who will submit a “certified offer” to the domain owner for the paltry and non-refundable fee of $20.

Agreed, it doesn’t say the domains are for sale.

It says “Make an offer to buy this domain.”

Doesn’t this seem a bit strange though. I mean, lets say a company uses Street View to get a publicly available photo or two of your home, then based on info from a site like this one*, or others, the company puts together a full page ad for your home. In this ad for your home the company offers people the opportunity to “Make an offer to buy your home”. For a fee, the company will help the buyer make an offer to buy your home.

But what if your home is not for sale though? Do you like some company making money pretending your home is for sale?

I might be the odd man here, but I just don’t like the idea of a company soliciting bids to buy my personal, private or intellectual property, or even a domain name I’ve registered. Unless of course, it’s for sale.

*that’s not my house

Hiya,

I have to agree entirely with Kurt on this one. Whilst it may be different for other people my firm belief is that this sort of thing needs to be banned or made illegal.

Making money from something where there could be absolutely no way for the end purchaser to see anything for their money is in my mind a complete joke even if it is up to the person putting the money forward to decide whether or not to do this!

Also the person might get the wrong end of the stick and start sending e-mails to the domain owner asking why they haven’t replied to their bid or why wasn’t my bid good enough for you and this could lead to threatening behaviour. All very underhand if you ask me!!

It would be much wiser if the person just e-mailed the site admin directly and asked them if it were for sale or not. No money spent and no hassle (hopefully!).

Just my views though.

Best wishes,

Mark

I think this type of service sucks, and to make matters worse, I feel that its just the type of service that NetworkSolutions would offer, which is why I haven’t used them as a registrar for almost 10 years now. I use to consider them incredibly trustworthy, but they’ve since just turned into a organization that’s all about the money, and coming up with more and more ways to capitalize on the information entrusted to them. 

I’ve moved all my clients, except one from their services. The one had purchased the domain for 10 years in advance, and we decided to wait until term expired before moving.

I checked a number of links and it seems that the ‘make an offer’ option is only available on domains registered with Network Solutions and GoDaddy—I could be wrong, it was an informal test, with only 15 domains.

Do a search on Dotster or Godaddy or X registrar and if the domain is not available you will (for most registrars) get an option to make an offer for the domain.  This seems to be standard practice.

I have no problem with people making me an offer on assets I own.  If the price is right, I will probably sell it to you.  Isn’t that how a free market works?

I’m sure there is a huge market for this sort of service in domain names.  The majority of domain names are for sale.  For example, LLLL.com (four letters) domains recently hit a point of almost 100% registration.  There are some being dropped occasionally but they are usually picked up very fast.  These domain names have been picked up because of their scarcity and of course most of them are not being used for anything but speculation of rising value.

Having a domain registrar allowing people to make offers on a domain that’s not for sale is something I’ve come to expect; but they do it mostly on their own site, and for the most part they only present the ads to people searching for domains.

However I haven’t run across a registrar yet that makes a practice of running full-page adds (a whole website of them), for the purpose of selling advertising, both for the domain and for anything related.

The combination of this spider-fed wiki, using your website’s and your company’s good name and info, as a tool for attracting ad-clicks, AND then embedding the ad, with the offer to buy the domain you’re looking at, that’s just not right.

Also, if you’ve opted out of this “service” (and I use the term “service” loosely here), which we did the day this site first popped up in the search-results for our Brand, they still run ads on our “opt-out” page and still show the offer to buy our domain.

It appears there is no way to fully opt out of helping them sell ads to people looking for us, or soliciting offers for our domain.

That just rubs me the wrong way.

John - I’m all for a “free market”, but one with a few restrictions.

A quick example is that in the USA, most of us don’t like it when our Social Security, Credit Card, Drivers License, Passport or “dedicated IP” numbers fall into the wrong hands. Most of us take extra steps to protect these registered ID numbers.

If you saw a company’s website advertising your identity (photo, age, sex, address . . . full “public” bio), and in a full-page ad, and after you had opted out of their “service”, and they just happen to have an embedded ad within the page that said “Make an offer to buy this man’s identity”. . . wouldn’t you find that just a tiny bit odd?

I guess I consider my company’s domain name as part of the company’s brand-identity, and as the company is now helping support 6 families, I don’t like some other company, or in this case, combination of companies, getting paid to solicit for purchasers of our part of our brand-identity.

I think this type of service sucks, and to make matters worse, I feel that its just the type of service that NetworkSolutions would offer…

Yes but are they really involved.
I think maybe this “Service” if you want to call it that (maybe Domain scalping would be better), preys on people who have no knowledge of how to buy a domain.
Maybe some idiot would think he could even buy “Microsoft” wouldn’t that be like hitting the lottery, Bill ought to pony up some cash for this sucker if he wants it back, [insert maniacal laugh mu-ha-ha-ha].

It’s like the certified service whoever they are that mails out letters to your clients that they have to pay $30 bucks to keep the domain they already own, if you haven’t seen these yet then beware, they’ve been around forever, but the name escapes me.
One of our clients got one just last week though.

As with scalping show me the money, and I’ll show you some tickets, who cares whether you get in or not.

On second glance, you actually have a couple of points wrong.  The “make offer” link does not show up for all domains.  The NetworkSolutions “make offer” link shows up for Ellislab because the whois information for that domain is being pulled from NetworkSolutions.  Only domains with certain registrars show this link and the box changes to match the registrar.  It is almost like a registrar widget.

However I haven’t run across a registrar yet that makes a practice of running full-page adds (a whole website of them), for the purpose of selling advertising, both for the domain and for anything related.

This site is not a full page ad on your site.  The site is a wiki which allows people to freely add sites and information about those sites.  By searching for a domain which is not in the list, a page is automatically created.  Domain tools are added as sort of a mash-up of available services.

The combination of this spider-fed wiki, using your website’s and your company’s good name and info, as a tool for attracting ad-clicks, AND then embedding the ad, with the offer to buy the domain you’re looking at, that’s just not right.

There are interesting arguments on this page.  I really don’t understand that argument because I believe in the openness of the net.  In other words, am I wrong if I link to your site and write up a blurb about you on my blog which in monetized by Adsense?  Of course I would be wrong if I were to slander you (you could sue me for that) but a simple link and basic information is not harmful.

Are you complaining that Google spidered your site without permission and posted info in their search engine which is making them billions of dollars?  I would guess not since this is a source of traffic.  Similarly, the site in question is giving you a free back-link.

A quick example is that in the USA, most of us don’t like it when our Social Security, Credit Card, Drivers License, Passport or “dedicated IP” numbers fall into the wrong hands. Most of us take extra steps to protect these registered ID numbers.

This is not a fair comparison.  You protect your social security number but your name, company name, company phone number, picture and other details are public information and posted in many open areas.  You likely do this to get your name “out there” so that people know about your service.

I am not saying your concerns are not valid.  The customer is always right, so if complaints are brought to their attention then they should do something to address them.  On the other hand, they are free to create links to your site and publish public information.

This is not a fair comparison.  You protect your social security number but your name, company name, company phone number, picture and other details are public information and posted in many open areas.  You likely do this to get your name “out there” so that people know about your service.

I’m afraid I have to disagree with this one. Not wanting to start an argument or anything but over here in the UK we have the D.P.A which is meant to stop this kind of thing from happening.

You should be able to put your information on your web-site whether it be your phone number address or whatever and that information should not be taken by anyone other than for the use that it is intended ie contacting you about your work.

This obviously doesn’t happen and is where all the problems begin. Just the other month I found out why I was still getting loads of calls and e-mails regarding a business that I set up years and years ago. This was a business that wasn’t ever even registered as it never got that far but I did place an advert in our Yellow Pages. That advert I got rid of a long time ago but still got loads and loads of calls regarding the business which is no more.

I recently found it on a web link directory and got in touch with them to ask how they had got all my information of which there was no web-site for so they would have had to have found it somewhere else. They told me that they had got it from companies house or some other company that has the listings when you register a company. Two things here were very odd as I had never even registered for one so that was impossible and two even if I had registered then the companies house had no legal right to pass that information on to anyone by law.

This leads me to believe that the Yellow Pages sold my information on to the other web link directory which is totally illegal.

This kind of thing just gets my goat and I think it needs to be stamped down on immediately. That’s just me though.

Best wishes,

Mark

There are two things to consider a) The max “limit” on the price of a domain/offer is WAY too low to talk me out of a domain 😉, and b) the $20 is not charged to the person requesting to make the offer unless the sale goes through from what I read in their fine print at the bottom of the page.

But I agree with Kurt.  Its like someone walking down the street and putting a sign in front of my house, come knock on my door and make me an offer even though I don’t know who you are, or why you are trying to buy my house, or my car, or…  You could not get away with that in the “real” world so exactly how do they get away with it in the virtual.  If the domain is newly registered and parked at a domain registration company it semi-makes sense, but doing this for LIVE web sites is actually fairly stupid.  Yes, so you want to buy my companies domain name, but not the company behind it?  yeah, good luck…

I think this type of service sucks, and to make matters worse, I feel that its just the type of service that NetworkSolutions would offer…

Yes but are they really involved. I think maybe this “Service” if you want to call it that (maybe Domain scalping would be better), preys on people who have no knowledge of how to buy a domain.

Yes, Network Solutions is really involved. They own the service, if you go to Certified Offer Service you’ll see the name is really Network Solution’s Certified Offer Service.

Also, I disagree about its status as both a .org and a wiki. It’s basically a spidering system, you can pull up domains and see that they taken the first paragraph of text for quite a few. And for many this doesn’t make since, since articles don’t always match with site purpose.

On second glance, you actually have a couple of points wrong.  The “make offer” link does not show up for all domains.

Sorry, I didn’t see that above, perhaps someone mis-spoke.

The question I’m raising is should the link show up for ANY currently registered domain in good standing?

This site is not a full page ad on your site.  The site is a wiki which allows people to freely add sites and information about those sites.  By searching for a domain which is not in the list, a page is automatically created.  Domain tools are added as sort of a mash-up of available services.

Yes, the site’s display technology is based on a wiki, but this company creates the pages with a bot. They don’t wait for someone to come along and search for something to create a page, they create them and publish them with a bot, and they don’t remove them even when you Opt-Out.

How We Obtain The Information We Make Available On The Site:

*company* compiles information regarding websites from the publicly available “whois” databases which domain name registries and registrars publish on the Internet. We also obtain information regarding websites from other publicly available sources (e.g., Alexa) and from the “about us” section of websites. (sometimes we get info from other similar pages, like the main page, but we don’t go deep) We then make that data available, along with a link to the websites, logos, thumbnail screenshots, in a centralized location at the Site. We also make available a map, which is nothing more than a spatial representation of otherwise publicly available information. Anyone can construct this map using the “about us” tool and one of a myriad free web-based mapping applications on the internet. While we only make available from the Site data which is publicly available (either from publicly available whois databases, from public areas of websites, or otherwise), we may make available contact information for a website. Users may freely edit and append information regarding websites.

This is an interesting part of that argument (John’s link) that brings up another issue.

No, the problem isn’t that you’re linking to my website per se; if all *company* was doing was linking to sites, there wouldn’t be a problem. The problem is that anybody can come along and write anything about my site in your wiki. Which means that I need to monitor this, and I don’t have the time nor (especially) the desire to do that.

Google doesn’t allow anyone to directly edit its search results on its site, doesn’t take offers on my brand identity, and in the case of a search for my brand, it frequently doesn’t even show any ads, and it automatically respects my robots.txt file. I don’t mind the way Google handles my information.

Similarly, the site in question is giving you a free back-link.

True, but as this site is outside of my market, it could arguably (and lets not even debate this one, save SEO for another day) reduce my search results. I like back-links when they are from the market I work in, but other back-links from out of my market may dilute my sites relevance in search results of our market. You know, if you sell icecream, and you site starts getting too many links from waste-water treatment facilities and composting sites. . . may not help your search results much.

This is not a fair comparison.  You protect your social security number but your name, company name, company phone number, picture and other details are public information and posted in many open areas.  You likely do this to get your name “out there” so that people know about your service.

Yes I do try and get my brand identity “out there”, but in a highly targeted market. I don’t want it showing up in just any market out there. Call me over protective if you like. I work in a sensitive market and there are things on the web I don’t want my company’s brand associated with. The wiki nature of this company’s site doesn’t allow me to keep my brand away from some things.

Let’s say you worked for this company. And you signed an NDA with a few clients that clearly states that you can’t ever make mention of your business relationship with these clients. But somehow, old spider-bot made the connection and figured out that your software was running this company’s site. Someone in their legal department happens upon this site in a search on their domain, and they see the list of domains associated with your software company, and to the legal team, it appears you are advertising your relationship with this company for your own gain, clearly out of step with your NDA.

Yes. . . you might be able to edit the dynamically created list of domains your company is associated with, but it never really goes away when your dealing with the web. And this could put your company in a bit of a bind. And could cost you some valuable time and energy (and money) to try and salvage your relationship with your client.

I don’t see how anyone is surprised that Network Solutions is behind this.  Have they engaged in any business practice that would not fall under the “Slimy” column?