.club domains turned 1 year old, which is time for celebration and renewal. There is a reason to celebrate, since .club is the best performing new gTLD so far in terms of domain sales and non-free registrations. It is also the perfect time to drop your .club domain if you changed your mind and don’t want to invest in yearly renewal fees.
These dropped domains are not available for hand registration again but exclusively auctioned by Snapnames. There are 10,711 domains on the list currently, which is a quite high number considering that altogether less than 80,000 .club domains were registered before 1 July 2014 and only these domains are already expired. So at least 10 percent of these registrations is dropped. There are 280,000 .club domains registered currently but most of them were registered later when the first success stories, especially the record sale of wine.club for $140,000 became famous. Thus, drops of these registrations will be available several months later only.
Back to the auction. It is somewhat inconvenient that auctions start at backorder price, $69 and not at $15, the registration price of the .club domain. While this is acceptable for dropping domains in most cases, I feel that this is not the same for a bulk dropping one year old extension auction. There are lots of trademarked domains included in the auction, like vodafone.club, nike.club, victoriasecret.club, unicredit.club, etc. There are lots of 3 letters and some better dictionary words, like hipster.club, depression.club or nostalgia.club. An interesting statistics: Among these 10,711 domains, there are 1,700 domains where even the .com is not registered, while .net is available for 3,500 domains. It is rather difficult to convince me why should I pay $69 for .club when I can register .com for $10 (or less). Maybe I am not right, since the auction just have been started and already there are bids on 75 domains.
