Domains via GoDaddy’s Watching List — Mining Available

Alvin Brown shares a way to find hand-reg domains to register.

I shared 3 tips to Discover Expired Domains Available at Hand-Registration Fee at the end of last year.  As a follow up, I’m sharing another method to discover available domains using GoDaddy’ Watching feature.

It’s not really a “fresh” feature as some of you may recall a brief experiment by GoDaddy to display Watcher data on auction landing pages. Nevertheless, you may discover a profitable opportunity exists using Watching export data as a method to bulk search for available domains.

In addition to providing a daily list of GoDaddy expiring domain auctions for the general public to peruse, I “watch” quite a sizable number of GoDaddy expiring domains each day. Prior to providing a daily list for the general public, I never used the export feature for Watching domains.

But for the last two years and counting, I download this list of expiring domains daily as I strategize regarding which domains I’m going to actively bid and at what cost — via GoDaddy’s Watching download (see image below).

I also use it as a tool to test my ability to guess what a domain auction is likely to close at, adding an extra column next to the bid Price column with my own estimated auction close value. I then check the auction close prices from the previous and compare the value with the value I assigned to each of the domains I tested against. But I digress.

There are thousands of expiring and closeout domains contained in the daily Watching exported CSV file. Some of the domains have bids while a good percentage have 0 (zero) bids at the time of export.

Nevertheless, I move each daily exported Watching CSV files to a storage drive at the end of every week. It was this action of “digital” spring cleaning that uncovered over 2 years worth of exported daily expired domain data.

💡 Then I had a light bulb moment to execute a bulk search as an experiment to see if any of the domains were available for hand registration. 💡

In my very first export file, now just over 2 years old, I discovered nearly 10 percent of the domains were available at hand-reg fee. I executed a few additional bulk searches from different months and found most to have 6-10% of the domains available for hand registration.

And although I was tempted to bulk registration a few of the files, I slowly and calmly backed away from the browser to institute a 24-hour “sleep on it ahead of purchasing” policy.

Nevertheless, if you’re wanting to give this feature a try, do note you must start exporting the Watching list daily or weekly, but not attempt to bulk search until regarding 40-60 days into the future from export date.

It’s also worth noting I chose to use Hexonet’s Bulk Search feature over GoDaddy since of it allowing 1,000 domain searches as opposed to GoDaddy’s bulk limit of 500 domains per search.

And last but not least, for those of you with a bit of software development and engineering prowess, you could simply automate this process from A to Z using scripting, a database, and GoDaddy’s API to check domain availability.

Good luck and I hope to share an update in the near future ought to I manage to flip a few domains using this strategy and tactic.  Back to mining I go…