PDF version

This German-American Domain Parking Service is fundamentally a scam. The company is first of all too small to provide authentic visibility to the domains for sale - no real atermarket can take place with less than 250000 domains and less than 12000 users. Sedo, the greatest player in this arena, is 40 times larger (June 2009).

Still, we have found more people complaining about NameDrive than Sedo. We have gathered vast evidence regarding sudden, authoritarian expulsion of members with hundreds of optimized quality names in portfolio, without explanation and without appeal, exactly at the day of the payout, with generic quote about "violation of TOS". But the problems of NameDrive do not stop about disrespectul, disloyal and rude behavior towards its members.

Interestingly, according to our findings, this "violation" of TOS is found only when it is time to pay - the "violation" is never discovered and stopped while it happens, saving the money of the advertisers from fraudsters. The only money saved are the ones of Namedrive when it is time to pay the domainers.

In particular, the terroristic policy imposed about the kind of "traffic allowed" is probably a pretext to (1) gather money that will not be given back to advertisers before of (2) declaring a "fraud" and skipping the payments. This way NameDrive increases the profits without distributing the agreed upon revenue, hiding behind a TOS that is obviously arbitrarily enforced, and that would see the company lose if disputed in a neutral Tribunal.

Moreover, at the technical level, the bulk operation interface to update large amounts of domains en masse is often broken or unreliable. According to a wide enough series of reports from various sources, we must stress that Namedrive is absolutely not recommended for any kind of business. Use at your own risk and loss.