I’ve noticed a few similar situations before and all I can say is this: take a close look at the domain before placing a bid or you might just end up winning a typo like Investor.com (Lnvestor.com, NOT investor.com) and all of a sudden realize that the “deal of a lifetime” was simply an embarrassing mistake.
Here’s what you can do to avoid such mistakes:
1) perform a whois search for the “real” domain (in this case investors.com, don’t just copy/paste the domain you’re getting ready to bid on) and if you see that it is set to expire in 2016 or something, what does that tell you?
2) visit Google.com, copy/paste the domain you’re thinking about bidding on (so in this case Lnvestor.com) and perform a search. If you’ll see a “Did you mean: investor.com” message, what does that tell you?
The list could go on and on 😉
May 10th, 2011 at 7:48 am
NameJet really should show the names with capital letters as well to avoid any misunderstanding.
That must be a nasty surprise if buyer pays and then finds out what he got…
May 10th, 2011 at 8:39 am
They do show names in uppercase as well .. click on any name and go to the backorder page. You will see (view uppercase) next to the name of the domain.
Personally I think its a courtesy and Namejet or any auction house has no obligation to protect those people who fall short on the IQ test.
May 11th, 2011 at 9:56 am
If it sold at Namejet for $8k, wouldn’t that suggest that more than one person thought the domain was worth that much? we’re talking multiple stupid people here? Hard to believe. And how would that auction have gone, everyone realized the typo wasn’t worth paying more than $59 except for two (or more) people that ran it up to $8k?
The only thing I can suggest is that a lower-case “l” can look a lot like an uppercase “I”, especially with some of the fonts that Google uses in their ads, and that can give the word more notoriety. That only makes the ad look more appealing though, and if people think the word really is “investors” then they’ll just direct nav it if they ever want to return to the site and end up somewhere else. Besides, doesn’t AdSense have in their TOS something about not using typos, making my suggestion completely moot?
If it could be done, and with a more sexy word with lots of search traffic, I’d get that motivation, but I’m stumped on this one..
Funny stuff, thanks for the posting about this, I’d love to know the real motivation behind it, good or bad, right or wrong, smart or stupid!
January 5th, 2012 at 2:22 am
I think that is an intriguing point, it created me feel a bit. Thanks for sparking my thinking cap. At times I get so much in a rut that I just really feel like a record.
January 5th, 2012 at 2:30 am
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