A 360° platform’s domain was sold in May 2023. Its buyer says it has no connection to the old accounts.
The domain of a 360° panorama platform was acquired on 7 May 2023 under a sales agreement. The site at that address today is a different business, and its own notice says it has no connection with their database or previous user accounts. Take that sentence seriously — not because platforms usually die, because most do not, but because it is the plainest published description anywhere of what a platform customer actually holds: an account on somebody else’s domain, and a domain is an asset that can be sold separately from the service that ran on it.
What is actually on the record
- The domain was acquired on 7 May 2023, with a sales agreement. The notice on the site says so in those terms.
- The site at that address today publishes casino and gambling reviews. It is a different business and it does not claim to be a continuation of the old one.
- The notice disclaims responsibility for the previous owners, including their closure, and states there is no connection with their database or previous user accounts.
- We opened the page on 1 August 2026 to check that the notice is still there. It is. The link is in the sources at the foot of this post.
That is the entire factual claim, and we are going to stop there. It would be easy, and dishonest, to inflate this into a story about people’s tours turning into a casino site. What the notice says is worse than the inflated version and it has the advantage of being true: the entity now at that address holds nothing of the old service, the accounts included. Whatever those customers had, they did not have it anywhere that travelled with the domain.
Why this is a structural fact and not an anecdote
A domain name is a transferable asset with a market. A user database is a separate thing, governed by separate law, and a buyer of the first has no particular reason to want the second. So the ordinary, unremarkable mechanics of a wind-down are enough to produce this outcome. Nobody has to behave badly. The address survives the service, which is the opposite of what a customer intuitively assumes when they type it in.
Google’s search spam policy, last updated 15 May 2026, has a name for what commonly happens next. It defines expired domain abuse as buying an expired domain and repurposing it primarily to manipulate search rankings with content of little or no value to users, and its own worked examples include affiliate content on a site previously used by a government agency, and casino-related content on a former elementary school site. We are not asserting that any particular sale is an instance of that policy — that judgement is Google’s and not ours. What the policy establishes is that the pattern is common enough across the whole web to be written into a public rulebook, which is a stronger and more checkable claim than any anecdote.
The three ways a hosted tour actually ends
| What happens | How often we hear about it | What actually protects you |
|---|---|---|
| Your subscription lapses — a card expires, a company reorganises, the person who set it up leaves | Most common by a distance | Holding the files. Nothing else helps, because the failure is on your side of the relationship. |
| The supplier changes its plans, its limits or its prices | Common | Holding the files, or accepting the change. Those are the only two options a subscriber has. |
| The supplier is acquired, restructured, or closes | Rare — and it has happened, with a date | Holding the files. A promise cannot outlive the party who made it. |
Ranked by what we are asked about, not from a dataset. Nobody publishes failure rates for this industry, and we are not going to invent one to make the table look more rigorous than it is.
What to do about it this week
Find out what you would hold tomorrow
Ask your current supplier, in writing: if I stopped paying today, what do I still have, and in what format? Keep the reply somewhere that is not your inbox.
Take the export now, if there is one to take
An export you can request is not an export you have. Run it while you still have an account to run it from, and open what comes out before you assume it works.
Store the copy somewhere that is not the supplier
Your own storage, and a second location. A backup held inside the service you are worried about is not a backup; it is the same risk with a different name.
Work out the replacement cost, so it is a number rather than a fear
Count the positions in the tour you already have. That count and our published rates give you a replacement figure in about a minute: €40 for each of the first ten photographs, €30 for each one after, a €160 minimum, VAT on top.
What we do instead, and why it is deliberately boring
Every tour on our projects page was delivered as a self-contained folder the client keeps. There is no account, no seat and no subscription, so there is nothing that can lapse and nothing anybody can sell out from under it. That is not a feature we engineered around this risk; it is what the deliverable is, and the resilience is a side effect of the shape rather than a promise bolted on. What arrives on the last day lists what is in the folder.
We are also a one-person studio in Tirana, which is a real supplier risk of its own, and it would be incoherent to write this post and skip it. So we wrote that up separately, with the four questions about our own continuity we have not yet answered in writing: what happens to your tour if we stop trading.
Sources, and when we last checked them
- Notice from the current owner of the roundme.com domain, published on the site itself Checked August 2026 Opened 1 August 2026. States the domain was acquired on 7 May 2023 under a sales agreement and that the current owner has no connection with the previous owners’ database or previous user accounts. The site publishes casino reviews.
- Google Search Central, “Spam policies for Google web search”, last updated 15 May 2026 Checked August 2026 Defines expired domain abuse, and gives casino-related content on a former elementary school site as one of its worked examples.
Questions people ask
- Which platform is this?
- We describe competitors structurally rather than by brand, and we apply that to this one too — but the evidence has to be checkable, so the domain is linked in the sources at the foot of the post with the date we last opened it. Read the notice yourself. It is four lines long and it is the whole argument.
- Does this mean I should not use a platform?
- No. It means you should know which of the two things you are buying: a service you rent, or an artefact you keep. Renting is often the right call, and it is cheaper to start. What is not defensible is renting while believing you own, because the difference only becomes visible on the day you want to leave, which is the worst possible day to find out.
- How do I check whether my own tour would survive this?
- Switch your network off and open what your supplier gave you. If it runs, you hold a tour. If it does not, you hold an account. There is no third outcome and the test takes under a minute.
- If a platform closed with notice, wouldn’t I get my tours out?
- Possibly, and several have handled wind-downs decently. But you would be relying on a wind-down going well, being announced somewhere you read, and reaching you before the account expired. Each of those is a condition. A folder you already hold has no conditions attached to it.
