Clubhouse: newbies and snake oil salesmen?

What is going on with Clubhouse? Is this good for the domain name community or not?

Clubhouse is an invitation-only audio-chat social networking app launched in 2020 by software developers Alpha Exploration Co. It is currently only available for iOS and iPhone so I have not able to get on it.

Clubhouse has been the epicenter of domaining in the past month and in the past few days I am seeing a few reported domain name sales that are quite worrying. For example Josh Reason reported that an 8-day old hand registration sold for $1,100 on Clubhouse.

8 day old hand reg just sold for $1,100 on Clubhouse…. It’s listed for $699 on GoDaddy 🤣 https://t.co/6WQXN693GX

— | Josh |🎙️🌏👨‍💻 (@JoshDotCo) February 15, 2021

This domain turned out to be sellmeyourdomain.com, a domain that was hand-registered on the 7th of February, 2021. Yes that is just a few days ago. The plural was registered 5 days after that.

Some people are trying to convince us that this sale was some kind of end-user sale! This is total bullshit. This is not an end user sale. Just because a newbie bought it thinking he/she is going to “use” it doesn’t make it an end user sale. This is like buying a very expensive hammer to make hammers. All this while you have no idea what a hammer is and how to make it. You are not an end-user. You are a sucker.

Not sure if the sale has been completed yet so other issues may arise. Are all sales on Clubhouse real?

Darpan Munjal, founder of Squadhelp.com, also expressed his concern about Clubhouse domain sales:

AFAIK, there hasn’t been any sudden increase in end-user demand, so why are people suddenly paying dangerously high wholesale prices for domains via Clubhouse?

— Darpan (@darpanmunjal) February 15, 2021

This is domain name that is worth exactly $0. Anyone that has been domaining more than 5 minutes knows that.

Selling worthless domain names to newbies or creating a bubble will not get you far. Snake oil salesmen will sooner or later disappear and will leave behind them a lot of broke, desperate and angry people. The domaining industry’s reputation will sink even lower after all this.

Andrew Allemann wrote a post about Clubhouse addressing some of the disturbing issues: We need to talk about what’s going on at Clubhouse.

Speaking of disturbing issues… There are also people selling unjustifiably expensive domain name courses. People that closed down their brokerage after the Chinese bubble and went away organizing events for crypto newbies. Be careful what you pay for. (Bill Sweetman, an experienced member of the domaining community, did a couple of posts on social media and a comment on DNW.com about this course but on the next day he took these posts down. His explanation didn’t shed any light.)

Of course there are not just newbies and snake oil salesmen on Clubhouse. There are a few experienced and knowledgeable domainers out there mostly trying to do some damage control. Please support them and not the snake oil salesmen. We know who these people are.