Expired domain name 6397.com blows past $24,000…but why did it expire in the first place?

Well whoever owned 6397.com is likely kicking themselves right now, or if they’re reading this article, they are emailing Go Daddy to pay their $10 renewal fee. The domain has already exceeded $24,000 and there are more than five days left in the auction.

This is also a case where Estibot certainly seems to have a better handle on their pricing algorithms than Go Daddy. According to Go Daddy’s algorithms the domain is worth $9,844, Estibot thinks the fair market value is $37,000 which feels a lot closer to what we’ll see this go for.

6397-auction

As I’ve said many times before, I don’t know much about numeric domain names, they’ve never been a focus of mine and I’m honestly pretty shocked at how much attention this domain is seeing. Maybe I’m missing something but I would expect to see an 8 somewhere in this name to justify a price tag like this but hey, maybe the 4N .COM market is hotter than I thought.

I thought I’d do a bit of research to better understand who owned this domain. It has been under privacy protection at Go Daddy for around four years now, before that it was registered at eName by someone in China named Fan Shuini. I looked up other domains owned by Fan and he/she only had three other domains registered under than email address, none that jumped out at me.

Prior to Fan, someone named David Zuo owned the domain and taking a quick look on Whoisology I could see that David had/has a pretty nice portfolio of numeric domains. So it’s a bit puzzling when you dig deeper here. Clearly David knew what he was doing and saw this as a valuable name, possibly one of the more valuable names in his portfolio. He then sold it (or maybe donated it) to someone who seemingly knew very little about the value of the name.

Then, mysteriously, the name was transferred from eName to Go Daddy and immediately went under privacy protection. Is it just me or does it feel like this domain has some interesting history that has yet to be unraveled? I’m no detective…but if I was, I’d like to dig into this one a bit deeper.

What do you think? How did a valuable name like this end up expiring? I want to hear from you, comment and let your voice be heard!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton