Slashdot Log In
Drop-Catching Domains Is Big Business
Posted by
Soulskill
on Thu Jan 31, 2008 10:12 PM
from the losing-site-of-your-goals dept.
from the losing-site-of-your-goals dept.
WebsiteMag brings us news from the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse (CADNA) about a recent study of drop catching —'a process whereby a domain that has expired is released into the pool of available names and is instantly re-registered by another party.' The eleven day study showed that 100% of '.com' and '.net' domain names were immediately registered after they had been released. CADNA has published the results with their own analysis. Quoting:
"The results also show that 87% of Dot-COM drop-catchers use the domain names for pay-per-click (PPC) sites. They have no interest in these domain names other than leveraging them to post PPC ads and turn a profit. Interestingly, only 67% of Dot-ORG drop catchers use the domains they catch to post these sites — most likely because Dot-ORG names are harder to monetize due to the lack of type-in traffic and because they tend to be used for more legitimate purposes."
Related Stories
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
What needs to change (Score:5, Interesting)
Just days after I accidentally let one of my domains expire with godaddy, they told me it's in a probation period where it was protected and only I could re-register it if it was a mistake- the catch was that it'd cost $80, as opposed to the $10 it normally costs.
That price is arbitrary, as it's no skin off their backs to re-register it for standard cost. They're banking on drop-catching. Drop-catchers snatch domains faster than I've been able to, even using godaddy's service that watches and grabs a domain the minute it expires.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:What needs to change (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:What needs to change (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, so does goddady. I get all kinds of reminders from them. They also have auto-renewal options.
I suppose the only way to blow it would be to have your contact address some spam catcher address you never check. But that's not godaddy's fault.
Parent
No one should take that as a recommendation. (Score:3, Informative)
This article saved my domain (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What needs to change (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:What needs to change (Score:4, Interesting)
About 6 years ago there was a domain I found that was a month or so from expiring. I checked it every day and it wasn't ever renewed, it entered a hold period and presumably was going to be released to the public after n days (30 i think).
As the date approached I wrote a script to check the domain availability every 30 seconds, and alert me via email, phone, and loud annoying .wav file as soon as it became available. That never happened, it never officially became publicly available.
I emailed the new owner and his response was simply "$4000.00". It has now been parked for over 6 years rather than being used for a legitimate purpose.
I didn't know how the domain name business worked back then, but I learned then how sleazy it really is. These people are in bed with the registrars, and an individual who just wants a domain name less than 40 letters long is SOL.
Parent
Re:What needs to change (Score:4, Insightful)
Imagine being able to forward the '$4000.00' response to the Internet tax office - he's now liable for the $400 in taxes on his $4000 domain, every year. I bet he'd drop the price, or the domain pretty quick.
Parent
More than the drop catching (Score:5, Insightful)
"Drop-catching alone is not what has led to this problematic environment, but rather it is the abuse of the Add Grace Period in connection with drop-catching that appears to be the cause."
Gotta say domain tasting and parking spoil the internet for me. I've been thinking about setting up a website, and most of the names I checked were domain parked. I could easily live with the registration fee going up significantly if it meant that only people with a real use for domain bought it. The paper suggests that $100 (which isn't too much) is about the cutoff point where it starts to become financially stupid.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
My dad set up a server for our family, immediate and extended, that we all use for e-mail, to share pictures or videos, and anything else that you would want a server for. It would suck to have to add an extra $100 to the server costs.
Tasting may be on the way out (Score:5, Informative)
ICANN's fee is not a lot - 20 cents (US) per year - but that is expected to be sufficient to make domain tasting unprofitable.
Article here: http://www.circleid.com/posts/81299_domain_tasting_ends/ [circleid.com]
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Are you suggesting that I pay $100/year, or $100 registration fee, and then $10/year 'upkeep' fee?
The former would price me out of the market (personal vanity domain), the latter I could probably deal with.
This is not bad at all (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not like they're frontrunning (sniping) domain names. [slashdot.org]
The real problem is phony "registrars" (Score:4, Interesting)
Most of the "ICANN accredited registrars" [icann.org] are fronts for domain tasting. There are only a few real registrars; the rest are dummies for picking up dropped domains. Enom has a huge number of dummy fronts - "Enom1, Inc" through "Enom469, Inc".
One step needed is for ICANN to enforce the provision of the registrar agreement which allows ICANN to prohibit registrars from owning or speculating in domains. And the provision which requires that a registrar have assurance of payment before activating a domain. With that, the end of the "grace period", and Google refusing to monetize domains for the first five days, we should see this problem decrease. The .org TLD recently got rid of their grace period, and domain transactions dropped 90%.
We're working on this from the browser end. The general idea of our SiteTruth [sitetruth.com] system is to filter out the bottom-feeders. It's the next step after ad-blocking - make the link pages, directory pages, typosquatters, and similar junk far less visible.
It's not even clear that advertisers benefit from all those junk pages. If you advertise with Google ads, and get clicks from junk pages, do they really result in sales? Or is this just a way to take money from the real advertiser and divert it to some bottom-feeder?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Simple (Score:5, Insightful)
What about laws? (Score:3, Interesting)
My family name had this happen. (Score:3, Interesting)
I've waited three years for the name to expire, but they keep re-registering it. I've told them outright that I'm willing to pay $35, and that's it. By my measure, they'll hit that mark in their own spending next year.
Re:Make em expensive again (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Make em expensive again (Score:5, Insightful)
The only problem that I could see with this is web firms that created websites for other people/companies and register it in their name. I imagine to solve that you could just have the count reset after so long. I imagine these drop catchers register a lot of names all the time.
Parent
Re:Make em expensive again (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Make em expensive again (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly. I don't see why we need all these "convenient" arrangements with grace periods this and reduced charges that for organisations the other who have privileged access to the system. All these arrangements ever do is support people who are abusing the domain system by grabbing expired domains or (as discussed here a few days back) those that someone has expressed an interest in via a look-up, at sub-normal rates that make them attractive as advertising platforms.
Does anyone know the politics behind t
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Make em expensive again (Score:5, Insightful)
While they are at it, they should make scams, like Domain Registry of America does, to deceive people into switching registrars. There should be huge fines for this kind of thing, to the tune of $1000's per domain. You've got to make it financially devestating for people to engage in nasty behavior like this.
While I don't think you can make the squatting illegal, I think you can make it harder to make money on, which will effectively eliminate within a couple of years.
Parent
Re:Make em expensive again (Score:5, Funny)
Even though I'm in Australia.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
For approximately 99% of the population it will have a positive effect and only the greedies
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not about a few dollars, it's about laying waste to the whole domain registration process. What good is it if the only thing left to register is a string of random characters.
Re:Make em expensive again (Score:5, Interesting)
A while back, some friends and I were working on a business idea. Every single idea we had for a domain name was taken. I remember looking at all the sites to see what they had done with the domains, and out of 200 or so, fewer than 10 were actually doing something with the domain names aside from parking them and making money off the PPC ads.
As an example of this: I registered uresk.com (Uresk is my last name, and it is a very uncommon last name) back in 1997 or thereabouts. I was still in high school, and the $100/year ended up being prohibitively expensive so I didn't renew it. It has been passed around by speculators for almost a full decade now, despite the fact that it never had much traffic and "uresk" isn't a very common type-in. Bizarre.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Bad idea (Score:5, Interesting)
The whole problem was the domain speculators hardly ever had to pay for the domains they parked on in the first place with the Domain Tasting and other stupidity that the ICANN allowed (or planned?). Imagine being able to "taste" a house and only pay for it when people wanted to rent/buy it, how stupid is that?
Now to fix the problem THEY caused, you are suggesting that we PAY THEM MORE?
I bet if the domain tasting idiocy is really gone for good, this crap will drop to a manageable level in a few years.
It's really fishy that people are conveniently suggesting this, just after a dubious source of revenue stream is drying up for the registrars.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Domain names (useful ones, at least) are a fairly finite resource, though, and it seems inefficient to require a fee to own the right to them that is so low that people will still speculate and squat at a fairly high rate. Yeah, tasting will reduce this by quite a bit, but you only need to make $10 or so per year for h
Re:Make em expensive again (Score:5, Insightful)
ICANN wants to keep this artificial scarcity since it enables them to propose fee increases that keep the registrars profits obscenely high. And, as evidenced by this discussion, even technophiles have bought into their BS. We need to remember that there's nothing magic about 'com', 'net', 'org', 'edu' and 'mil' (and the relatively few others that have subsequently been created). Why is there no '.auto' TLD for car companies and automobile enthusiasts? Why is there no '.music' TLD for bands and music enthusiasts? Why are there not thousands of other TLDs that are appropriate for other purposes?
Because ICANN says so. There's little to no technical reason why. And changing this makes a hell of a lot more sense than upping the registration fees. All increasing registration fees accomplishes, other than annoying PPC site operators (who will adapt, just as SPAMers adapt to every technical hurdle that is sent their way), is to funnel even more money to the registrars.
Parent
Re:Make em expensive again (Score:5, Insightful)
Creating more TLDs will probably help, but causes other problems. If I am interested in purchasing an Audi, do I go to audi.com or audi.auto? Is it permissible for me to register audi.{something} for my own use? What if I register {somedomain}.books and someone already has {somedomain}.com? That is bound to cause confusion. I don't know - I like the idea in some ways, but it seems like it would open up a whole bunch of other problems.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, the value of the domain is much greater than a database entry, but the cost to the registrar is the cost of a database entry (and your share of the maintenance of that database). I'm sure the $35/year the Microsoft pays Verisign is well worth the cost. But it doesn't change the fact that Verisign is probably making $34/year or more in
Re:Make em expensive again (Score:4, Insightful)
The mistake of flattening the tree (to name an example that I still have a valid email address under, the Japanese government should be
How many of you young folk in the United States have ever had an email address with multiple dots in it? My record is <steve@romulus.sedd.trw.com> or <baur@venice.sedd.trw.com> in the 1980s.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm in favour of new TLDs but only if those tlds have strict rules about who can register what in them. A greater number of "anyone can register anything" style TLDs (of which there are already loads) would bring nothing of value IMO.
Re:Make em expensive again (Score:5, Insightful)
Strict regulation, maybe. Remove domain tasting? Yes. But raising prices for honest customers? Hell no.
A better question would be whether there's copyright infringement having somebody register a domain that uses your site's name.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Make em expensive again (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Mine, too (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Question: legality? (Score:4, Interesting)
Raising the price will just stop the normal guy from buying a domain. The problem isn't people just impulse buying a domain that someone else would really want to use, it's the guys who get every single domain and set up ads. Perhaps the IRL zoning laws could be implemented to buying domains, in that it wouldn't be allowed to just set up a page full of ads and keywords and no content at all. There would be loopholes (set up a blog about law and other various text-ad cash cow topics), but it would beat the current setup, aside for the whole "freedom to do whatever you want with your domain" issue.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes. Property speculation is an old business. But the prices are rather more than a few bucks for a property, and property rights do not suddenly expire. It's a very different situation, so your point isn't clear.
I agree that something like zoning laws would be great if the correct formulation is possible, but I don't see how raising the price above the easy profits threshold stops the normal guy. There were plenty of vanity registration
I smell something fishy going on (Score:3, Insightful)
The domain tasting BS has to go. And it looks like it's on its way out.
The bulk of domain spam squatting problem is because the ICANN and many registrars have been doing dubious/stupid stuff in the past.
BUT, now someone is appears to be saying "let's fix the problem by giving the registrars more money per domain".
Amazing. Rewarding people for doing something bad/evil.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And like any good realist, I don't blindly trust the free-market,