I’ve been watching domains drop every day for almost two years now over at GoDrops.com and it’s turned out to be not a small source of domain registrations for me and for some members. First, I have to thank Jamie from DotWeekly.com for getting me hooked and up to speed on the drop-catching process and great “insider” information. (Other domainers have also recently starting blogging about the esoteric science of drop-catching).

Before April 1st, drop-catching decent names was near impossible due to massive domain tasting by Enom, Maxim Internet, various NameMedia companies, Pool and a host of others. Tasters did usually drop their domains for refunds during the grace period, and this provided a second chance to grab whatever you had your eye on. The same taster might register the domains again, a practice called domain kiting, or other tasters would grab these deleted names (e.g. Maxim would catch Enom drops, etc…) It was fun to watch the circus from the view of my whois scanner/database. Tasters now have to be more selective — some taster registrars even collapsed and lost their names — which means there are now more domains available at drop time.

Don’t kid yourself about the domains you are able to get off the drop. Even though it’s the best time to get higher quality domains – before the masses have combed through the various distributed drop lists – these are still domains that no one thought it worth to spend even $18 for a backorder at GoDaddy and most recently Name.com. Good quality brandables and long-tail keywords do fall through the cracks from time to time – that’s the whole rational for drop-catching for yourself in the first place!

Happy Drop-Catching! Keep it real and keep it dot COM!