Pool remains in the dropcatching business but will anybody use it?

Pool announced on the 20th of December that it is shutting down many of it’s registrars effective January 10, 2013. This did not come as a big surprise as Pool has not been very successful catching dropped domains in the past couple of years and registrars are very expensive to maintain. It keeps losing high value domains to Snapnames, Namejet and even Backorder Zone.

Pool actually shut down MOST of it’s registrars. They shut down 80+ registrars leaving them with about 20 left. Pool’s CEO, Richard Schreier, says that they will continue to offer the backorder service, just with a different implementation model on their end. They estimate to have about 20 registrars playing in the drop when this is all over.

I am not sure how they are going to compete against the big auction houses with just 20 registrars when they couldn’t compete when they had 100+ registrars.

Pool’s move to shut down registrars left thousands of domains in limbo. Pool’s domains will be moved to the registrar NamesBeyond as ICANN decided. I haven’t tried my solution to the Pool problem yet but I heard reports that it works.

Will you continue using Pool?