What is Daily Drop?
Each day, Verisign - the registry behind .com and .net - releases a list of domains at 2pm EST that have been dropped by people and are now available to the general public. What we do is take this list and filter out all the domains that have already been registered.
Why is the domain I clicked on now unavailable?
Unfortunately, due to the public nature of this available list, a lot of the better domains tend to get snapped up rather quickly. Our filter scans the list every few minutes to clear out domains that have already been registered, but there will inevitably be a few on the list that are registered but haven't been removed yet.
What if 2 customers order the same domain and we manage to grab it - does it go into an auction?
Unlike a backorder, where competing orders go to auction, these domains are real-time open registrations, just like the domains you find in a regular domain search (in fact, these domains also appear in domain searches; we've just split them off to make them easier for you to find). Like all domains from regular searches, once someone processes the registration, they get the domain.
What happens after I place an order?
To give you the best chance of getting these domains before other people from other registrars, orders from Daily Drop skip the cart and go right to the order process. The idea is to get you from click to registration as quickly as possible.
Do you have any tips on how to increase my odds of getting one of these domains?
Because they're all first-come-first-served, the best way to increase your odds is to be prepared. Be on the page right at 2pm EST, make sure you already have an account on Moniker with filled-out contact information, pre-add some funds to your account so you can skip the credit card transaction process, and be sure to do some finger stretches. Warmed-up fingers are scientifically proven to click faster.
What is your star rating based on?
The star rating is based on a 3rd-party algorithm meant to predict the value of each domain. This prediction is largely based on the current popularity of a domain, so if a domain is currently getting hits and has some SEO value, its star rating will theoretically be higher. (Eventually we hope to develop our own prediction algorithm, but we've yet to come across the right domain-obsessed math PhD for the job... one day it'll happen.)
The prediction market never perfectly aligns with real life though, so don't skip over low-rated domains. You never know when you'll strike gold on something the algorithm completely missed.