16 ms·

How many .com domain names are unused?

275 points by jekor 8y ago

leowoo91 8y ago
"There are currently 137 million .com domain names registered." But how many is regularly visited today by most of the population? A good 10k max?
- gohwell 8y ago
  Alexa can give you an idea of the most popular sites. https://www.alexa.com/topsites https://www.alexa.com/topsites
  - marcosdumay 8y ago
    Well, there are 500 on the top 500. I don't think Alexa goes low enough to answer the GP.
- davidivadavid 8y ago
  10k sounds low by at least a couple orders of magnitude.
lifeisstillgood 8y ago
Aside from anything else, there is a lot of work out into this - it's a pretty robust piece of research, and is (I assume) a fairly good calling card as there are many business questions that can only be answered with this sort of skill set / stubbornness
whttheuuu 8y ago
Domain renewals should be priced higher. $500/yr, $1000/yr, $5000/yr would prevent squatters.
- chki 8y ago
  Wouldn't this completely prevent small local organizations/business owners from running their own websites and push them in the Facebook/Google/etc ecosystem? or do I not understand what a "renewal" is?
  - behringer 8y ago
    No you understood right. He's suggesting that a domain should be 5000 a year so that you or I could never possibly own any .com domain for personal use.
    - Tepix 8y ago
      He didn't limit his suggestion to .com
- cmiller1 8y ago
  Wouldn't that be harmful to small businesses though?
- waiseristy 8y ago
  That's a horrible solution. How about we add more TLD's so it costs effectively $5000/yr to squat the same domain on all the alternative TLD's
- yumaikas 8y ago
  And they would keep the web from being usable by anyone that is not in it for business, but wants to put up a site. $20 a year for a domain plus $50 a year is an easy price for getting a server to experiment with. If things cost 10 times that, it would price out a lot of activity at the margins of the web.
- djaychela 8y ago
  It would also prevent most private individuals from owning their own domain - hardly a solution without collateral damage.
- cr0sh 8y ago
  I'm a hobbyist with a few domain names (under 10 total); of those, the majority are in "use" (that is, there is something of mine they resolve to - not to a blank page or a "for sale" page or anything like that). But a couple or so have no content behind them (and honestly, some day I'll probably let them go back to the wild). Should I have to pay the amounts you list for something that is a hobby? What about others with hobby domains and sites? Should they have to pay such extreme amounts just to keep their hobby site going? There are people out there who run sites "just because" - giving away information and content for free, like the web used to be - like it was meant to be, not this almost seeming abomination we have today, built on ephemerous "likes" and other useless metrics. Your solution would do nothing but turn the web even further to corporate control, and leave hobby sites to only the well heeled, or to those who can scrape by (perhaps NPR fund-drive style). The majority would simply fold up shop, never to be seen again. I get it - I don't like true squatters any more than the next person; that is, those who sit on a domain hoping to make a buck off of some words. I have no problem with a business establishing a valuable domain based on their name and reputation. I don't like those who sit on domain names that sound or seem like a similar company's name, and try to bank of that (or worse). But I think your solution of "raising rates" - at least unilaterally - isn't the answer, unless we want a worse web experience than we already have today.
- zizee 8y ago
  Perhaps a better solution would be for each subsequent domain cost $1 extra to renew. I.e. your 11th domain would cost you $10 extra per year, your 101st domain a hundred extra a year. I don't have a big problem with people holding onto a half dozen domains for years at a time and not making much use of them, but companies owning thousands of domains as speculation? F that noise.
  - c22 8y ago
    This seems pretty hard to enforce. What if instead the fee per domain just increased by a dollar per year? The first few dozen years shouldn't be too onerous for those who aren't squatting on a mountain of domains and if your domain is 50+ years old maybe you've found a way to monetize it.
    - zizee 8y ago
      This seems reasonable as well.
  - munk-a 8y ago
    Holding companies would break an approach like this very quickly - it's likely that the cost burden of this change would hit smaller companies much quicker than large ones.
    - zizee 8y ago
      Correct me if I am wrong, but are you saying domain sqautters could spawn 1000s of holding to maneuver around my proposal? I guess there could be countries/states where you can register a company for a very low cost. What is the cheapest place one can start a company?
      - munk-a 8y ago
        $50 is the price to incorporate in Arkansas, Colorado, Hawaii, Iowa, Oklahoma and Mississippi[1] apparently [1] https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/241528 https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/241528
- munk-a 8y ago
  I absolutely disagree, but I think it is reasonable for domain authorities of various gTLDs to incorporate company names into domain name rights a bit more - if your company is FooBar and foobar.com is taken you may get some legal advantage in any efforts to secure it, this could just shift the domain name squatting issue to a company name squatting issue though. And, I'm also making the assumption that we're fine with pushing personal pages and other domain uses off on a different gTLD.
  - techsupporter 8y ago
    > And, I'm also making the assumption that we're fine with pushing personal pages and other domain uses off on a different gTLD. This is a sure sign of getting old, in the vein of "old man yells at cloud," but you can have my personal domain that's been registered in a common gTLD long enough for it to buy its own beer when you pry it out of my registrar's hands. Yeah, it sucks to have come along at the end of the landrush and all of the good spots are taken. That's, sadly, life when it comes to scarce things like that. I sure wish I'd been alive in the 40s or old enough in the 80s to buy waterfront property in Ballard when it was cheap but that time has passed, too.
    - sbov 8y ago
      This is one benefit of having a unique name. My good friend, "Robert Miller" is out of luck. Me, well, yeah. Only one person with my name in the United States, possibly the world.
  - zhte415 8y ago
    nissan.com? > I think it is reasonable for domain authorities of various gTLDs to incorporate company names into domain name rights a bit more - if your company is FooBar and foobar.com is taken you may get some legal advantage in any efforts to secure What about Foobar Plubbers? Do they get Foobar.com? And Foobar Restaurant in Dallas? Split it to FoobarPlubmers.com and FoobaRestaurantDallas.com? And FoobarPlubmersOhioLimited, vs FoobarPlumbersTennesseePartners? Mr Foobar for a personal domain, or Ms Foobar for a portfolio of work?
- AdamGibbins 8y ago
  Do that and I'll drop my personal.com so will lose control of my domain for email and handover more lock in to Google/email provider of choice.
banana_giraffe 8y ago
I'd be curious how many domain names are used, but not for the web or email. No idea how to measure this, and I'm sure it's tiny. For instance, I have a .io domain I use as my own little personal dynamic dns service since dyndns turned evil. The TLD doesn't do anything interesting, and any web pages served by the subdomains are done on nonstandard ports, so if this study scanned .io domains, they'd classify my domain as not in use, when it very much is.
- asaph 8y ago
  > .. dyndns turned evil. Care to elaborate?
  - madsushi 8y ago
    Since they stopped offering a free plan, I imagine. I just paid them the money, it's worth it.
    - ce4 8y ago
      There are better free alternatives like freedns.afraid.com out there if you dont really need to rely on your router that may only support Dyn.com
  - banana_giraffe 8y ago
    In the grand scheme of things, it's not the evilest thing to have ever happened. At some point the Windows auto-updater decided to push a new feature that changes the network DNS settings to make them point to some Oracle DNS server. If you undo the changes without disabling the "feature" in the app, it'll reset them for you. It was done with the claim of speeding up DNS lookup or somesuch. It's a checkbox, and no doubt it would remember the setting if I changed it, but the idea an app would change my DNS settings (which, in my case broke an internal app that was admittedly fragile to begin with) without my permission was enough for me to cancel my DynDNS account there and then while I cobbled together a replacement.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
dsl 8y ago
Just because a domain has ads on it or no webserver, does not mean it is unused. I have quite a few domains I use for email and such that I park with ads. They make me $20-$30 a month and I still get full use of the domain for what I need it for. Edit: People are asking what I use. DomainAdvertising.com. When I originally signed up with them you had to have thousands of domains (which I have sold off), I have no idea what the requirements are now.
- darkengine 8y ago
  Can I ask what you're using to park them? I have a few unused domains myself.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Unless I misunderstand the term, isn't your domain already "parked", i.e. bought but not connected to a server?
    - TheGrumpyBrit 8y ago
      In the image in the linked post, the "No Web Server" would be what you describe. "Parked" is where you point the domain at a generic page so that visitors see a page, but you're not actively hosting any kind of web server there.
- tivert 8y ago
  > I have quite a few domains I use for email and such that I park with ads. They make me $20-$30 a month and I still get full use of the domain for what I need it for. Can you go into more detail about how you did that? I'm surprised that a random domain would get enough traffic, unless it was a common word or typo away from a major domain.
- p1necone 8y ago
  I also have a domain that doesn't have a site or email attached to it that I use as a code namespace prefix. I believe this is a common practice? (Although many have a business or personal webpage on the same domain)
jcoffland 8y ago
Excellent research! Finding available and meaningful domain names is a big problem. One solution is to chose a non-.com TLD. There are many but it's still an unpopular choice. I believe this is changing and other TLD will become more popular as .com names become more limited. With all the TLDs out there it becomes cost prohibitive to buy them all. List of TLDs: http://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt http://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt
coldacid 8y ago
That reminded me, I have domains to renew. I better take care of that.
computator 8y ago
Can a domain name registrar register a domain name for themselves for free or for a minimal fee? What about Verisign -- if they registered ".com" domain names for themselves, who would they even pay since there is no one above them? Seriously, does anyone know the answer to this? I've never found an authoritative answer. I've wondered if domain name registrars are speculating in the domain name market themselves. Perhaps even insidiously grabbing domain names that you've shown an interest in. Maybe millions of domain names are reserved by the registrars themselves!
- rootusrootus 8y ago
  Wasn't godaddy or someone like them doing exactly that, a number of years ago? I seem to recall a situation where you'd go to their site and search for a domain, and if you didn't buy it, then the next day it would mysteriously show as no longer available, but purchasable.
  - simcop2387 8y ago
    Yea they'd abuse the 3 day grace period that was put in place to squat the domains that were searched. That let them temporarily lock up the domain and also announce to the world that there was interest in the domain, leading to more squatting.
  - bigiain 8y ago
    It's called domain name front running. GoDaddy have repeatedly been accused of it, as have many other registrars... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running
    - xfitm3 8y ago
      I think this specific process is referred to as domain tasting. Front running is using insider information, such as whois logs, while tasting is actively registering domains and measuring how much traffic the domain gets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting
jchallis 8y ago
I'm shocked by the lack of porn on the Internet. Gambling appears to be a much more popular activity.
- jmts 8y ago
  Though I have absolutely no evidence to support this, I suspect that gambling doesn't suffer the same, uh.. stamina issues, that porn probably does. I assume that the sustained stream of small amounts of currency would easily add up to more revenue for gambling than porn, resulting a larger market.
- aboutruby 8y ago
  > 0.59% I researched it and most sites seem to agree on the fact that at least 4% of websites are sex-related, seems a lot more realistic to me. I think the study is classifying normal sex-related websites as "Content" and porn filled parkings domains as "Porn".
jdlyga 8y ago
www.steam.com. They've been holding out for almost a decade trying to get money from Valve.
- zanny 8y ago
  Its a shame Armenia controls .am because ste.am isn't in use right now.
hanoz 8y ago
We've got to the stage now where if you've got a handful of .coms sharing a server, they'd have to be pretty substantial sites before your hosting costs would exceed your domain renewal fees. That's one hell of a market failure.
- tedunangst 8y ago
  Huh? $10/year doesn't buy all that much hosting.
  - zamadatix 8y ago
    Considering the site:server ratio for 99% of the web it's far above $10/y/server
danillonunes 8y ago
All the ones that I want!
zanny 8y ago
I'm not really well informed about the politics of DNS at the top, but I've always had the impression ICANN has been grossly negligent / corrupted over the last twenty years. At the end of the day there is profound capital interest in making name records unfair and noncompetitive in order to rent seek fortunes off the Internet and I see no indication ICANN is anything but compromised by those interests in the way they hand out TLDs and enable registrars to operate as for profit corporations. Nothing about a database translating human readable strings to IP addresses should be a damn profit center. I'm surprised the EFF, FSF, etc haven't ever shown interest in replacing ICANN's registrar model with something that enables registration without squatting, doesn't let anyone rent seek a fortune off of naming things, or create profit incentives that leads to the mess where some things are named strangely because someone is trying to extort money for it. There are some edge technologies like namecoin and IPNS that seem to be trying to approach this problem in novel ways but its a shame we don't have a fair consensus model on naming things that actually works.
- rafiki6 8y ago
  Couldn't agree more. Not sure why the task of operating DNS' isn't the domain of governments the world over. It's kind of like operating a post office. Post office's are the ones who have the routing information and capability to route physical messages and packages. They are still operated on a for profit model, but they are also generally very well regulated. Same thing should apply with registrars
  - zanny 8y ago
    I believe that is how the country code TLDs do work, but most nations (who are given ownership of them) they just hire a corporation to sell domains and make rent seeking gross revenue off a few characters of a URL. But those are eclipsed by the generic TLDs where its just a happy accident registrars and rent seekers are making fortunes off of words with com or net at the end of them.
  - ehnto 8y ago
    I am against privatisation of key infrastructure and I would certainly count the internet as key infrastructure. However I am not sure the government would be entirely benevolent. So I agree that some good regulations are probably a good start.
markovbot 8y ago
I'm surprised that such a large percentage of domains are registered with GoDaddy. What leads people to pick them? They're such a shitty registrar, every time I have to deal with them it's awful.
- magic_beans 8y ago
  They're usually the only registrar people are aware of.
  - astura 8y ago
    I guess those lewd superbowl commercials paid off then.
    - zhte415 8y ago
      Compounding superbowl and name recognition: Their referral incentives are also quite transparent and competitive compared to other quite large registrars that have clauses like, and this is paraphrasing, "payouts of $75 dollars must be accrued within 3 months or will be forfeited" or "must refer $300 dollars of signups per month". I imagine this causes referring 3rd parties that read small print to align their product with GoDaddy than a competitor.
- stevenhuang 8y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if it's more the case GoDaddy snatches them all up and people don't bother to leave.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  It's trustworthy and their domain management tools, particularly for dealing with large numbers of domains, is on point. I've transferred to other registrars before, and am moving some of my less critical domains to Cloudflare for the cost savings currently[1]. But my main domains will remain with GoDaddy for the foreseeable future. Oh, and they have 24/7 phone support, that at least, last time I had to call, was US-based. I don't truly trust anyone who doesn't have good phone support. Ticket systems are great and all for low priority requests, but it's too easy for a place with only a ticket system to handle you in a low priority way. [1]The transfer process is straightforward and the price can't be beat, but their domain management features are still incredibly immature. You can't have name servers set that aren't Cloudflare's, every time you go to domain registration, it wants you to transfer ALL of your domains. And bulk management of domains on Cloudflare is nonexistent: You can't even find the expiration/renewal dates of your domains on Cloudflare without visiting the page for each one individually. It's actually easier to find the expiration dates for all your domains that are not on Cloudflare (on the Domain Registration page). I do like it but they have work to do.
spking 8y ago
I own nibble.com and rolled my own very simple static "parked" page using Bootstrap and an Escrow.com button. In my opinion the parking services like Sedo etc. aren't worth it just for capturing sales leads...the commission is too high.
- jlgaddis 8y ago
  Just in the last few days, I've been looking for something simple like this to put on userhelp.com, thanks!
3xblah 8y ago
"4. Not all records in the zone file are valid domains. Some do not have a WHOIS record and may act as honeypots to catch people distributing and using zone files without permission." It has been a while since I looked at the com zone file access ageement but as I recall the most substantial restriction was on redistribution. A wee bit of web searching shows there are still plenty of non-official sources selling zone files. Perhaps it's just me but sometimes I think the number is increasing. Are the honeypots designed to catch these sellers and stop them from selling? Does Verisign enforce the ZFA agreement? Maybe all Verisign can do is revoke the access of the licensee who breached their agreement?
YjSe2GMQ 8y ago
I was hoping to see there a block with unregistered domain names. One could do it by, for example, training a Markov chain/neural network to spew out (sample) domains, and then see how many are currently registered, to compute the general XXXX.com space utilization fraction. This approach would be powered by a more sensible, IMHO, probability distribution than, say, taking all domain names with up to 30 {a-z0-9} characters with uniform probabilities.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
pcmaffey 8y ago
I wonder how many of the 25% newly registered domains were registered for the first time ever?
jccalhoun 8y ago
It seems like it has been this way for a long time. I remember back in the dialup days in college sitting around trying out random urls and even then many of them were ad sites that were for sale.
robterrin 8y ago
Anybody who is interested by the economics of domain names should read Henry George who laid all this out over one hundred years ago in Progress and Poverty. Domains are just the new frontier since we discovered and claimed all physical land. The 1990's were a land grab and now we are entering the period of calcification.
fattypouch 8y ago
I made a little app to try and illustrate some of what the original article was about. The search is kind of screwed, because GoDaddy's API always malfunctions. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54225882/is-godaddy-api-returning-bad-results https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54225882/is-godaddy-api-... But the scroller on the bottom is new domains registered today. They open in a new tab. http://mufasa.gq/lander/ http://mufasa.gq/lander/
macittuna 8y ago
On https://dofo.com https://dofo.com we have all this data and more, you can check it freely. By using dozens of filters, you can refine the results and see whatever you want. For example, 66,237 .com domain names contain "coin" and are listed for sale on marketplaces: https://dofo.com/search/?contains=coin&on_sale=y&extension=com https://dofo.com/search/?contains=coin&on_sale=y&extension=c... You can also check the popularity of any keyword on the trends page: https://dofo.com/trends/keyword/coin https://dofo.com/trends/keyword/coin It says, how popular is the keyword, how many registered domain names exist with that keyword, what percentage of these domain names are used actively as a website and more. As for the registrars; yes Godaddy is the first one with about ~70 million domain names under management and Namecheap and Tucows are following it: https://dofo.com/registrars https://dofo.com/registrars Disclaimer: I'm the co-founder of dofo.com
- Tepix 8y ago
  You may want to fix the headline "we work with the bests"
  - macittuna 8y ago
    Thanks, you're right :) We will fix it today.
rjf72 8y ago
Domain registration is one of the most perfect use scenarios for a blockchain type system. It would be entirely decentralized meaning no party has any unfair advantage which leads to these sort of systems where players obtain massive amounts of domains for non-market prices and then sit on them indefinitely relying on the occasional way over market price sale to justify the business model. And while views may vary here, I think it would also generally be a positive for governments to no longer be able to strip individuals or companies of their domains, such as for instance SciHub. One practical problem in the early stages is that various domains could be snagged and used to extort the companies/individuals who 'rightfully' own them for unreasonably large sums of money if they wanted access to their domains. This issue could be resolved by premining and mirroring the current domain system before public launch with domains transferred to their rightful owners upon proof of ownership akin to the systems used by Let's Encrypt. Probably the most challenging problem would be in determining how many domain registration coins would be generated per unit time. Too few and prices inflate too high and destroy the system. Too many and prices deflate and the coins become worthless - destroying motivation to keep mining, in turn again destroying the system. Lots of possible solutions though. Fun problem!
- lunchables 8y ago
  https://handshake.org/ https://handshake.org/
GlitchMr 8y ago
Just because a domain may appear to be unused, it doesn't necessarily mean it is unused. For instance, I have a domain I use as a file hosting which I can link to when I want to share something (I used to use Imgur for this purpose before, but frankly I don't trust any image host at this point, so I set up nginx to host a single directory). As you need to know the file names to download them, the domain would appear to be unused. Although now that I look at I suppose I do explain its purpose, so here is that: https://i.xfix.pw/ https://i.xfix.pw/.
- Tepix 8y ago
  But xfix.pw also has a web page.
- lunchables 8y ago
  And what percentage of domains do you think represent use cases like this? I don't think it significantly changes the statistical analysis. Sure, there are some tiny fraction of a percent of weird uses from people like us, but it's hardly worth even mentioning.
Tepix 8y ago
Quote from the research: > the crawling server was only configured for IPv4 He may have misqualified 11% or more of those domains.
- lunchables 8y ago
  I seriously doubt 11% of domains are IPv6 only, but I'd love to see someone do some research on it. I would assume its only a fraction of a percent that ONLY responds via IPv6.
techaddict009 8y ago
"Domain Usage, from a sample of 2,188 domains" isnt that to low sized sample to analyse data of more than 20 million domains?
- YjSe2GMQ 8y ago
  It should be fine - strong law of big numbers. They even computed some confidence intervals (99% CI ±3%), but it's not precisely explained how, just references a paper.
platz 8y ago
What is the statistical power and what makes the sample "random"?
prickledpear 8y ago
One intriguing proposal to limit domain name squatting is "Harberger Taxation"[1] Under this scheme, every owner of a domain would declare a value for the domains they own, and pay a percentage of that value as a tax (replacing the current annual registration fees). Owners are incentivized to post an accurate value for their domain because they must sell their domain for the price they list if anyone offers to buy at that price. While it makes sense in theory, I think there are some practical problems that would have to be addressed before such a system could be put into use. For example, what stops a company with a large bankroll from squashing competitors by purchasing their domain? [1] - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2818494 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2818494
- giancarlostoro 8y ago
  > While it makes sense in theory, I think there are some practical problems that would have to be addressed before such a system could be put into use. For example, what stops a company with a large bankroll from squashing competitors by purchasing their domain? They don't have to sell if the offer sucks.
  - prickledpear 8y ago
    The idea is that if I'm a startup that owns google-disruptor.com, I have to declare a value for that domain name (let's say $100,000), and pay a percentage of that value as a tax. I'm then obligated to sell the domain to anyone who is willing to pay $100,000. This prevents me from undervaluing the domain. Since Google has a much larger bankroll than me, they can purchase the domain for $100,000, and revalue the domain at $500,000 -- out of my price range.
    - GilbertErik 8y ago
      Since Google has a much larger bankroll than you, if they decided that they wanted prickledpear.com, wouldn't you have to sell it to them, or any other party with deep enough pockets?
air7 8y ago
Domain names are incredibly underpriced (I'm referring to the "good" ones). With the evolution of the internet, where startups are now willing to spend 10k-100k on a domain, it makes no sense that its original cost was 10$, and that insentivises speculators. If prime domains would cost 100$ or even 1000$ per year it wouldn't affect a running business much, but would almost completely eliminate the viablilty of domain squatting. And if you're an individual you'll still have many other options. This could be applied to the entire COM TLD (it does stand for commercial after all) or only for parts of it under some criteria (like length etc).

275 points by jekor 8y ago

"There are currently 137 million .com domain names registered." But how many is regularly visited today by most of the population? A good 10k max?

gohwell 8y ago
Alexa can give you an idea of the most popular sites. https://www.alexa.com/topsites https://www.alexa.com/topsites
- marcosdumay 8y ago
  Well, there are 500 on the top 500. I don't think Alexa goes low enough to answer the GP.
davidivadavid 8y ago
10k sounds low by at least a couple orders of magnitude.

lifeisstillgood 8y ago

Aside from anything else, there is a lot of work out into this - it's a pretty robust piece of research, and is (I assume) a fairly good calling card as there are many business questions that can only be answered with this sort of skill set / stubbornness

whttheuuu 8y ago

Domain renewals should be priced higher. $500/yr, $1000/yr, $5000/yr would prevent squatters.

chki 8y ago
Wouldn't this completely prevent small local organizations/business owners from running their own websites and push them in the Facebook/Google/etc ecosystem? or do I not understand what a "renewal" is?
- behringer 8y ago
  No you understood right. He's suggesting that a domain should be 5000 a year so that you or I could never possibly own any .com domain for personal use.
  - Tepix 8y ago
    He didn't limit his suggestion to .com
cmiller1 8y ago
Wouldn't that be harmful to small businesses though?
waiseristy 8y ago
That's a horrible solution. How about we add more TLD's so it costs effectively $5000/yr to squat the same domain on all the alternative TLD's
yumaikas 8y ago
And they would keep the web from being usable by anyone that is not in it for business, but wants to put up a site. $20 a year for a domain plus $50 a year is an easy price for getting a server to experiment with. If things cost 10 times that, it would price out a lot of activity at the margins of the web.
djaychela 8y ago
It would also prevent most private individuals from owning their own domain - hardly a solution without collateral damage.
cr0sh 8y ago
I'm a hobbyist with a few domain names (under 10 total); of those, the majority are in "use" (that is, there is something of mine they resolve to - not to a blank page or a "for sale" page or anything like that). But a couple or so have no content behind them (and honestly, some day I'll probably let them go back to the wild). Should I have to pay the amounts you list for something that is a hobby? What about others with hobby domains and sites? Should they have to pay such extreme amounts just to keep their hobby site going? There are people out there who run sites "just because" - giving away information and content for free, like the web used to be - like it was meant to be, not this almost seeming abomination we have today, built on ephemerous "likes" and other useless metrics. Your solution would do nothing but turn the web even further to corporate control, and leave hobby sites to only the well heeled, or to those who can scrape by (perhaps NPR fund-drive style). The majority would simply fold up shop, never to be seen again. I get it - I don't like true squatters any more than the next person; that is, those who sit on a domain hoping to make a buck off of some words. I have no problem with a business establishing a valuable domain based on their name and reputation. I don't like those who sit on domain names that sound or seem like a similar company's name, and try to bank of that (or worse). But I think your solution of "raising rates" - at least unilaterally - isn't the answer, unless we want a worse web experience than we already have today.
zizee 8y ago
Perhaps a better solution would be for each subsequent domain cost $1 extra to renew. I.e. your 11th domain would cost you $10 extra per year, your 101st domain a hundred extra a year. I don't have a big problem with people holding onto a half dozen domains for years at a time and not making much use of them, but companies owning thousands of domains as speculation? F that noise.
- c22 8y ago
  This seems pretty hard to enforce. What if instead the fee per domain just increased by a dollar per year? The first few dozen years shouldn't be too onerous for those who aren't squatting on a mountain of domains and if your domain is 50+ years old maybe you've found a way to monetize it.
  - zizee 8y ago
    This seems reasonable as well.
- munk-a 8y ago
  Holding companies would break an approach like this very quickly - it's likely that the cost burden of this change would hit smaller companies much quicker than large ones.
  - zizee 8y ago
    Correct me if I am wrong, but are you saying domain sqautters could spawn 1000s of holding to maneuver around my proposal? I guess there could be countries/states where you can register a company for a very low cost. What is the cheapest place one can start a company?
    - munk-a 8y ago
      $50 is the price to incorporate in Arkansas, Colorado, Hawaii, Iowa, Oklahoma and Mississippi[1] apparently [1] https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/241528 https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/241528
munk-a 8y ago
I absolutely disagree, but I think it is reasonable for domain authorities of various gTLDs to incorporate company names into domain name rights a bit more - if your company is FooBar and foobar.com is taken you may get some legal advantage in any efforts to secure it, this could just shift the domain name squatting issue to a company name squatting issue though. And, I'm also making the assumption that we're fine with pushing personal pages and other domain uses off on a different gTLD.
- techsupporter 8y ago
  > And, I'm also making the assumption that we're fine with pushing personal pages and other domain uses off on a different gTLD. This is a sure sign of getting old, in the vein of "old man yells at cloud," but you can have my personal domain that's been registered in a common gTLD long enough for it to buy its own beer when you pry it out of my registrar's hands. Yeah, it sucks to have come along at the end of the landrush and all of the good spots are taken. That's, sadly, life when it comes to scarce things like that. I sure wish I'd been alive in the 40s or old enough in the 80s to buy waterfront property in Ballard when it was cheap but that time has passed, too.
  - sbov 8y ago
    This is one benefit of having a unique name. My good friend, "Robert Miller" is out of luck. Me, well, yeah. Only one person with my name in the United States, possibly the world.
- zhte415 8y ago
  nissan.com? > I think it is reasonable for domain authorities of various gTLDs to incorporate company names into domain name rights a bit more - if your company is FooBar and foobar.com is taken you may get some legal advantage in any efforts to secure What about Foobar Plubbers? Do they get Foobar.com? And Foobar Restaurant in Dallas? Split it to FoobarPlubmers.com and FoobaRestaurantDallas.com? And FoobarPlubmersOhioLimited, vs FoobarPlumbersTennesseePartners? Mr Foobar for a personal domain, or Ms Foobar for a portfolio of work?
AdamGibbins 8y ago
Do that and I'll drop my personal.com so will lose control of my domain for email and handover more lock in to Google/email provider of choice.

banana_giraffe 8y ago

I'd be curious how many domain names are used, but not for the web or email. No idea how to measure this, and I'm sure it's tiny. For instance, I have a .io domain I use as my own little personal dynamic dns service since dyndns turned evil. The TLD doesn't do anything interesting, and any web pages served by the subdomains are done on nonstandard ports, so if this study scanned .io domains, they'd classify my domain as not in use, when it very much is.

asaph 8y ago
> .. dyndns turned evil. Care to elaborate?
- madsushi 8y ago
  Since they stopped offering a free plan, I imagine. I just paid them the money, it's worth it.
  - ce4 8y ago
    There are better free alternatives like freedns.afraid.com out there if you dont really need to rely on your router that may only support Dyn.com
- banana_giraffe 8y ago
  In the grand scheme of things, it's not the evilest thing to have ever happened. At some point the Windows auto-updater decided to push a new feature that changes the network DNS settings to make them point to some Oracle DNS server. If you undo the changes without disabling the "feature" in the app, it'll reset them for you. It was done with the claim of speeding up DNS lookup or somesuch. It's a checkbox, and no doubt it would remember the setting if I changed it, but the idea an app would change my DNS settings (which, in my case broke an internal app that was admittedly fragile to begin with) without my permission was enough for me to cancel my DynDNS account there and then while I cobbled together a replacement.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

dsl 8y ago

Just because a domain has ads on it or no webserver, does not mean it is unused. I have quite a few domains I use for email and such that I park with ads. They make me $20-$30 a month and I still get full use of the domain for what I need it for. Edit: People are asking what I use. DomainAdvertising.com. When I originally signed up with them you had to have thousands of domains (which I have sold off), I have no idea what the requirements are now.

darkengine 8y ago
Can I ask what you're using to park them? I have a few unused domains myself.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Unless I misunderstand the term, isn't your domain already "parked", i.e. bought but not connected to a server?
  - TheGrumpyBrit 8y ago
    In the image in the linked post, the "No Web Server" would be what you describe. "Parked" is where you point the domain at a generic page so that visitors see a page, but you're not actively hosting any kind of web server there.
tivert 8y ago
> I have quite a few domains I use for email and such that I park with ads. They make me $20-$30 a month and I still get full use of the domain for what I need it for. Can you go into more detail about how you did that? I'm surprised that a random domain would get enough traffic, unless it was a common word or typo away from a major domain.
p1necone 8y ago
I also have a domain that doesn't have a site or email attached to it that I use as a code namespace prefix. I believe this is a common practice? (Although many have a business or personal webpage on the same domain)

jcoffland 8y ago

Excellent research! Finding available and meaningful domain names is a big problem. One solution is to chose a non-.com TLD. There are many but it's still an unpopular choice. I believe this is changing and other TLD will become more popular as .com names become more limited. With all the TLDs out there it becomes cost prohibitive to buy them all. List of TLDs: http://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt http://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt

coldacid 8y ago

That reminded me, I have domains to renew. I better take care of that.

computator 8y ago

Can a domain name registrar register a domain name for themselves for free or for a minimal fee? What about Verisign -- if they registered ".com" domain names for themselves, who would they even pay since there is no one above them? Seriously, does anyone know the answer to this? I've never found an authoritative answer. I've wondered if domain name registrars are speculating in the domain name market themselves. Perhaps even insidiously grabbing domain names that you've shown an interest in. Maybe millions of domain names are reserved by the registrars themselves!

rootusrootus 8y ago
Wasn't godaddy or someone like them doing exactly that, a number of years ago? I seem to recall a situation where you'd go to their site and search for a domain, and if you didn't buy it, then the next day it would mysteriously show as no longer available, but purchasable.
- simcop2387 8y ago
  Yea they'd abuse the 3 day grace period that was put in place to squat the domains that were searched. That let them temporarily lock up the domain and also announce to the world that there was interest in the domain, leading to more squatting.
- bigiain 8y ago
  It's called domain name front running. GoDaddy have repeatedly been accused of it, as have many other registrars... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running
  - xfitm3 8y ago
    I think this specific process is referred to as domain tasting. Front running is using insider information, such as whois logs, while tasting is actively registering domains and measuring how much traffic the domain gets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting

jchallis 8y ago

I'm shocked by the lack of porn on the Internet. Gambling appears to be a much more popular activity.

jmts 8y ago
Though I have absolutely no evidence to support this, I suspect that gambling doesn't suffer the same, uh.. stamina issues, that porn probably does. I assume that the sustained stream of small amounts of currency would easily add up to more revenue for gambling than porn, resulting a larger market.
aboutruby 8y ago
> 0.59% I researched it and most sites seem to agree on the fact that at least 4% of websites are sex-related, seems a lot more realistic to me. I think the study is classifying normal sex-related websites as "Content" and porn filled parkings domains as "Porn".

jdlyga 8y ago

www.steam.com. They've been holding out for almost a decade trying to get money from Valve.

zanny 8y ago
Its a shame Armenia controls .am because ste.am isn't in use right now.

hanoz 8y ago

We've got to the stage now where if you've got a handful of .coms sharing a server, they'd have to be pretty substantial sites before your hosting costs would exceed your domain renewal fees. That's one hell of a market failure.

tedunangst 8y ago
Huh? $10/year doesn't buy all that much hosting.
- zamadatix 8y ago
  Considering the site:server ratio for 99% of the web it's far above $10/y/server

danillonunes 8y ago

All the ones that I want!

zanny 8y ago

I'm not really well informed about the politics of DNS at the top, but I've always had the impression ICANN has been grossly negligent / corrupted over the last twenty years. At the end of the day there is profound capital interest in making name records unfair and noncompetitive in order to rent seek fortunes off the Internet and I see no indication ICANN is anything but compromised by those interests in the way they hand out TLDs and enable registrars to operate as for profit corporations. Nothing about a database translating human readable strings to IP addresses should be a damn profit center. I'm surprised the EFF, FSF, etc haven't ever shown interest in replacing ICANN's registrar model with something that enables registration without squatting, doesn't let anyone rent seek a fortune off of naming things, or create profit incentives that leads to the mess where some things are named strangely because someone is trying to extort money for it. There are some edge technologies like namecoin and IPNS that seem to be trying to approach this problem in novel ways but its a shame we don't have a fair consensus model on naming things that actually works.

rafiki6 8y ago
Couldn't agree more. Not sure why the task of operating DNS' isn't the domain of governments the world over. It's kind of like operating a post office. Post office's are the ones who have the routing information and capability to route physical messages and packages. They are still operated on a for profit model, but they are also generally very well regulated. Same thing should apply with registrars
- zanny 8y ago
  I believe that is how the country code TLDs do work, but most nations (who are given ownership of them) they just hire a corporation to sell domains and make rent seeking gross revenue off a few characters of a URL. But those are eclipsed by the generic TLDs where its just a happy accident registrars and rent seekers are making fortunes off of words with com or net at the end of them.
- ehnto 8y ago
  I am against privatisation of key infrastructure and I would certainly count the internet as key infrastructure. However I am not sure the government would be entirely benevolent. So I agree that some good regulations are probably a good start.

markovbot 8y ago

I'm surprised that such a large percentage of domains are registered with GoDaddy. What leads people to pick them? They're such a shitty registrar, every time I have to deal with them it's awful.

magic_beans 8y ago
They're usually the only registrar people are aware of.
- astura 8y ago
  I guess those lewd superbowl commercials paid off then.
  - zhte415 8y ago
    Compounding superbowl and name recognition: Their referral incentives are also quite transparent and competitive compared to other quite large registrars that have clauses like, and this is paraphrasing, "payouts of $75 dollars must be accrued within 3 months or will be forfeited" or "must refer $300 dollars of signups per month". I imagine this causes referring 3rd parties that read small print to align their product with GoDaddy than a competitor.
stevenhuang 8y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if it's more the case GoDaddy snatches them all up and people don't bother to leave.
ocdtrekkie 8y ago
It's trustworthy and their domain management tools, particularly for dealing with large numbers of domains, is on point. I've transferred to other registrars before, and am moving some of my less critical domains to Cloudflare for the cost savings currently[1]. But my main domains will remain with GoDaddy for the foreseeable future. Oh, and they have 24/7 phone support, that at least, last time I had to call, was US-based. I don't truly trust anyone who doesn't have good phone support. Ticket systems are great and all for low priority requests, but it's too easy for a place with only a ticket system to handle you in a low priority way. [1]The transfer process is straightforward and the price can't be beat, but their domain management features are still incredibly immature. You can't have name servers set that aren't Cloudflare's, every time you go to domain registration, it wants you to transfer ALL of your domains. And bulk management of domains on Cloudflare is nonexistent: You can't even find the expiration/renewal dates of your domains on Cloudflare without visiting the page for each one individually. It's actually easier to find the expiration dates for all your domains that are not on Cloudflare (on the Domain Registration page). I do like it but they have work to do.

spking 8y ago

I own nibble.com and rolled my own very simple static "parked" page using Bootstrap and an Escrow.com button. In my opinion the parking services like Sedo etc. aren't worth it just for capturing sales leads...the commission is too high.

jlgaddis 8y ago
Just in the last few days, I've been looking for something simple like this to put on userhelp.com, thanks!

3xblah 8y ago

"4. Not all records in the zone file are valid domains. Some do not have a WHOIS record and may act as honeypots to catch people distributing and using zone files without permission." It has been a while since I looked at the com zone file access ageement but as I recall the most substantial restriction was on redistribution. A wee bit of web searching shows there are still plenty of non-official sources selling zone files. Perhaps it's just me but sometimes I think the number is increasing. Are the honeypots designed to catch these sellers and stop them from selling? Does Verisign enforce the ZFA agreement? Maybe all Verisign can do is revoke the access of the licensee who breached their agreement?

YjSe2GMQ 8y ago

I was hoping to see there a block with unregistered domain names. One could do it by, for example, training a Markov chain/neural network to spew out (sample) domains, and then see how many are currently registered, to compute the general XXXX.com space utilization fraction. This approach would be powered by a more sensible, IMHO, probability distribution than, say, taking all domain names with up to 30 {a-z0-9} characters with uniform probabilities.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

pcmaffey 8y ago

I wonder how many of the 25% newly registered domains were registered for the first time ever?

jccalhoun 8y ago

It seems like it has been this way for a long time. I remember back in the dialup days in college sitting around trying out random urls and even then many of them were ad sites that were for sale.

robterrin 8y ago

Anybody who is interested by the economics of domain names should read Henry George who laid all this out over one hundred years ago in Progress and Poverty. Domains are just the new frontier since we discovered and claimed all physical land. The 1990's were a land grab and now we are entering the period of calcification.

fattypouch 8y ago

I made a little app to try and illustrate some of what the original article was about. The search is kind of screwed, because GoDaddy's API always malfunctions. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54225882/is-godaddy-api-returning-bad-results https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54225882/is-godaddy-api-... But the scroller on the bottom is new domains registered today. They open in a new tab. http://mufasa.gq/lander/ http://mufasa.gq/lander/

macittuna 8y ago

On https://dofo.com https://dofo.com we have all this data and more, you can check it freely. By using dozens of filters, you can refine the results and see whatever you want. For example, 66,237 .com domain names contain "coin" and are listed for sale on marketplaces: https://dofo.com/search/?contains=coin&on_sale=y&extension=com https://dofo.com/search/?contains=coin&on_sale=y&extension=c... You can also check the popularity of any keyword on the trends page: https://dofo.com/trends/keyword/coin https://dofo.com/trends/keyword/coin It says, how popular is the keyword, how many registered domain names exist with that keyword, what percentage of these domain names are used actively as a website and more. As for the registrars; yes Godaddy is the first one with about ~70 million domain names under management and Namecheap and Tucows are following it: https://dofo.com/registrars https://dofo.com/registrars Disclaimer: I'm the co-founder of dofo.com

Tepix 8y ago
You may want to fix the headline "we work with the bests"
- macittuna 8y ago
  Thanks, you're right :) We will fix it today.

rjf72 8y ago

Domain registration is one of the most perfect use scenarios for a blockchain type system. It would be entirely decentralized meaning no party has any unfair advantage which leads to these sort of systems where players obtain massive amounts of domains for non-market prices and then sit on them indefinitely relying on the occasional way over market price sale to justify the business model. And while views may vary here, I think it would also generally be a positive for governments to no longer be able to strip individuals or companies of their domains, such as for instance SciHub. One practical problem in the early stages is that various domains could be snagged and used to extort the companies/individuals who 'rightfully' own them for unreasonably large sums of money if they wanted access to their domains. This issue could be resolved by premining and mirroring the current domain system before public launch with domains transferred to their rightful owners upon proof of ownership akin to the systems used by Let's Encrypt. Probably the most challenging problem would be in determining how many domain registration coins would be generated per unit time. Too few and prices inflate too high and destroy the system. Too many and prices deflate and the coins become worthless - destroying motivation to keep mining, in turn again destroying the system. Lots of possible solutions though. Fun problem!

lunchables 8y ago
https://handshake.org/ https://handshake.org/

GlitchMr 8y ago

Just because a domain may appear to be unused, it doesn't necessarily mean it is unused. For instance, I have a domain I use as a file hosting which I can link to when I want to share something (I used to use Imgur for this purpose before, but frankly I don't trust any image host at this point, so I set up nginx to host a single directory). As you need to know the file names to download them, the domain would appear to be unused. Although now that I look at I suppose I do explain its purpose, so here is that: https://i.xfix.pw/ https://i.xfix.pw/.

Tepix 8y ago
But xfix.pw also has a web page.
lunchables 8y ago
And what percentage of domains do you think represent use cases like this? I don't think it significantly changes the statistical analysis. Sure, there are some tiny fraction of a percent of weird uses from people like us, but it's hardly worth even mentioning.

Tepix 8y ago

Quote from the research: > the crawling server was only configured for IPv4 He may have misqualified 11% or more of those domains.

lunchables 8y ago
I seriously doubt 11% of domains are IPv6 only, but I'd love to see someone do some research on it. I would assume its only a fraction of a percent that ONLY responds via IPv6.

techaddict009 8y ago

"Domain Usage, from a sample of 2,188 domains" isnt that to low sized sample to analyse data of more than 20 million domains?

YjSe2GMQ 8y ago
It should be fine - strong law of big numbers. They even computed some confidence intervals (99% CI ±3%), but it's not precisely explained how, just references a paper.

platz 8y ago

What is the statistical power and what makes the sample "random"?

prickledpear 8y ago

One intriguing proposal to limit domain name squatting is "Harberger Taxation"[1] Under this scheme, every owner of a domain would declare a value for the domains they own, and pay a percentage of that value as a tax (replacing the current annual registration fees). Owners are incentivized to post an accurate value for their domain because they must sell their domain for the price they list if anyone offers to buy at that price. While it makes sense in theory, I think there are some practical problems that would have to be addressed before such a system could be put into use. For example, what stops a company with a large bankroll from squashing competitors by purchasing their domain? [1] - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2818494 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2818494

giancarlostoro 8y ago
> While it makes sense in theory, I think there are some practical problems that would have to be addressed before such a system could be put into use. For example, what stops a company with a large bankroll from squashing competitors by purchasing their domain? They don't have to sell if the offer sucks.
- prickledpear 8y ago
  The idea is that if I'm a startup that owns google-disruptor.com, I have to declare a value for that domain name (let's say $100,000), and pay a percentage of that value as a tax. I'm then obligated to sell the domain to anyone who is willing to pay $100,000. This prevents me from undervaluing the domain. Since Google has a much larger bankroll than me, they can purchase the domain for $100,000, and revalue the domain at $500,000 -- out of my price range.
  - GilbertErik 8y ago
    Since Google has a much larger bankroll than you, if they decided that they wanted prickledpear.com, wouldn't you have to sell it to them, or any other party with deep enough pockets?

air7 8y ago

Domain names are incredibly underpriced (I'm referring to the "good" ones). With the evolution of the internet, where startups are now willing to spend 10k-100k on a domain, it makes no sense that its original cost was 10$, and that insentivises speculators. If prime domains would cost 100$ or even 1000$ per year it wouldn't affect a running business much, but would almost completely eliminate the viablilty of domain squatting. And if you're an individual you'll still have many other options. This could be applied to the entire COM TLD (it does stand for commercial after all) or only for parts of it under some criteria (like length etc).