We’ve just added 50 new .com domain names to our prêt à nommer website, Names-a-GoGo. Among them you’ll find: 8Petal, Ayyokay, AxionRev, Blyssium, Ceonira, Flextris, Forsavant and Vorpion. Where do these names come from? Many are left over from custom name exercises conducted on behalf of our clients—the also-rans, if you will. Many of the rest are the result of a kind of addiction. It’s fun at times simply to chase down possibilities unbidden.

Back to the first kind: As name consultants, we often reserve name candidates with available .com URLs on our clients’ behalf. This way, we remove the risk of inadvertently losing them as name exploration continues. (In some business categories, most clients who want a company name still strongly prefer a .com appellation over some other alternative.)

The fate of leftovers

So what happens to the vast majority of these domain names after our clients have made their choices and moved on? Often, we simply let ownership lapse. Many of the URLs we reserve satisfy such specific criteria that others are unlikely to see value in them.

At other times, though, we renew. Dotcom domain name real estate is getting scarcer all the time, and it seems a shame to lose control of URLs that some other company might want. (If you think the names we release revert to the open market where someone new can snap them up for a few bucks as we did originally, think again. With rare exceptions, “found” URLs don’t revert to the open market. Almost always some other reseller snaps them up.)

How resellers work

Take Dropcatch. As its name implies, this service catches what others drop and then puts them out to bid. We’ve found names we’ve let go of on Dropcatch, for one. Also on HugeDomains and GoDaddy. Case in point: Forma3d, which we provided to a client who allowed it to lapse, now appears on HugeDomains for $5,895. Along these lines, Afternic sometimes writes to ask if we would’t mind releasing to them a specific domain name that’s up for renewal.

Put another way, in the world of proprietary names, you don’t simply release a fish back into the sea. Even when you think that’s what you’re doing, what’s really happening is that you’re dropping the fish into someone else’s net.

As our inventory of  domain names has grown—today we’ve registered more than 900—we’ve decided to offer them on a to-go basis at a fraction of the cost of a purpose-created name. Generally, we charge less for them than other resellers charge. For anyone looking to engage us through our Alphanameric service, it might not hurt to browse Names-a-Go-Go first. Early customers of our ready-to-name service have had luck finding what they’re looking for in our stacks.