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Ask HN: Is domain squatting still profitable? Is there a solution?

• PaulHoule 5y ago
  I think most of the domains being squatted on are worth nothing, people don’t want to deal with squatters, who pay registration fees every year, etc. ‘.com’ doesn’t have the cachet it used to, many TLDs are viable, plus the number of two and three word combinations plus neologisms is so great squatters can’t stop anyone who is creative and flexible from getting a good domain. I’d imagine somebody gets a big payout once in a while and that hope keeps squatters squatting. I know (from trying to sell a few domain names) that it doesn’t happen often. An alternate approach is to hold on to old domain names that get some traffic and hyperlinks. Alternately there is ‘SEOmaining’ where you develop simple sites on the domains you hold. If you can make $1 a month with a site you can hold the domains forever and you can even sell links from those sites, link to your own ‘real’ sites, …
  • dazc 5y ago
    True, many are worthless but of those that are not they simply want too much money. All too often you see a ridiculous price and just accept that domain is never going to be used for anything. I made an offer on a domain once and the immediate response was 'I already have been offered more than this'. Obviously he thought this was some great negotiating technique? As it happened, I didn't increase my offer and, a few months later, the domain dropped and I got it for the basic registration fee. I have had a few good experiences though where the person holding the domain was professional and would accept a reasonable offer but, anecdotally, they are a minority.
    • Jailbird 5y ago
      Any idea how one makes an offer when the details are obfuscated or hidden behind registrar data? I see broker services but that seems for commercial needs (and already more than I would want to pay) (Example: a domain I want is just sitting there. They used to use it but have stopped bothering... maybe now I could make a direct reasonable offer? I don't have any commercial plans so thousands of dollars doesn't work for me. )
      • bhartzer 5y ago
        Look up the owner using Whois. There has to be a valid email address that goes to the owner. Even if it’s under privacy it must still work. Emails that don’t work is invalid whois and can be reported to icann. Registrar has to investigate for invalid whois data or the domain will be made available again. So to make an offer just send an email. If they’re interested they’ll most likely get back to you. Most registrars will also get in touch with their customer to see if they want to sell.
    • kevinventullo 5y ago
      I’ve had the same experience. At my previous company, we wanted to register a domain for our team’s project using a (relatively common word).ai domain. The squatter wanted something like $50k for it, which even with our fairly flexible budget we balked at out of principle.
• wirthjason 5y ago
  I saw this on another HN post sometime back about “Space Jam 2”. Best form of squatting ever! https://www.spacejam2.com/ https://www.spacejam2.com/ I’m not sure that squatting makes sense anymore. Getting generic names like “pets” or “travel” isn’t important today as it once was. As for someone snatching up your old domain of a nonsense word, that sounds like someone looking for a quick buck. There will always be people looking to do that.
  • danuker 5y ago
    Hah! The jam is out of stock.
  • 4cao 5y ago
    Don't miss the Space Jam 2 trailer: https://www.spacejam2.com/space-jam-2-trailer https://www.spacejam2.com/space-jam-2-trailer
  • yitchelle 5y ago
    Wonder if it is worth the punt and register sequels of Space Jam? ie Spacejam3, Spacejam4 etc.
• snowwrestler 5y ago
  A few years ago I registered a short (five letter) nonsense word as a .com domain for a side project. I ended up using a different name so I let the .com expire. It was instantly registered by someone else. But I just checked, and it’s available now. (Not squatted.) I think some people run systems to buy up domains that expire, in case the expiration is a mistake. Then they can make a few bucks selling the domain back to the dummy who let it expire accidentally. There’s a limit to how much you can make doing this, though, as any big company probably has a trademark on their domain. And if they do, they can just ask ICANN to seize it from you. I think that’s different from someone who registered a common word (or many) and holds onto them, hoping to sell them to people who want them. The domain squatting business is kind of like poker. You have a slow bleed of costs from annual domain fees (the ante in poker) and few deals to offset that (winning a hand in poker). Over time you have to either score some big deals, or eventually cut your costs. This limits the utility of squatting random nonsense domains for very long.
  • tomhoward 5y ago
    I've been both harmed and helped by this at different times - in both cases by HugeDomains. The domain for a brand name of a product line of my father's small business lapsed when I forgot to renew it, and it was registered by HugeDomains with an asking price of US $2600. The business unit had mostly wound down and it's not important enough to spend that kind of money on; it's just a bad look when people browse directly to that address. I registered the .net, and I'm hoping they'll quit renewing the .com some time and we'll be able to get it back for an ordinary price. It's quite obscure so no legitimate buyer will want it. I'm happy for them to keep wasting their money in the meantime. Another time, I was starting a new company, and had an idea for a name that had personal significance, but involved common-enough words that you would expect it to be taken already. It turned out HugeDomains was squatting it, and asking about $2500. In this case it was worth spending that money to buy it off them, so I did, and have been a happy owner of that domain ever since. I'm not happy about supporting domain squatting, and I've wondered about how it could be prevented, and even considered starting some kind of "benevolent" squatting service to beat the extortionate practices that HugeDomains seems to be undertaking in cases where people just forget to renew, but maybe the way they do it is the only way to do that kind of thing economically, and that only a complete overhaul of the domain name market could open the way for better practices.
• shaicoleman 5y ago
  > Since I made up that word and it was 14 characters long, are they just going to keep it for 20+ years? Usually they set up analytics on the holding page, and only renew if it reaches a certain threshold of traffic.
  • thih9 5y ago
    Interesting; makes sense. I guess there are SaaS or perhaps self hosted solutions that facilitate that. Does anyone know what services are being used? Or are people mostly building their own pages?
    • cmauniada 5y ago
      You can probably use google anayltics to setup a simple tag.
  • JimmyRuska 5y ago
    It can also be bets. You buy domains based on likely emerging markets, trends and keywords and you drop them if they stop getting traction. May be awhile before you actually catch much traffic or value from those words but it only cost $12/yr while holding the bag. You prune the ones that fizzle out.
• tifkap 5y ago
  It's not a thing anymore, for two reasons: 1, It used to be that the only 'real' domain name was .com. Nowadays this artificial scarecity is over. If you want to launch a service as foo.io, that is fine. 2, You can sue to have a domain name confiscated if you own the trademark with the same name https://cyber.harvard.edu/property00/domain/CaseLaw.html https://cyber.harvard.edu/property00/domain/CaseLaw.html
  • slivanes 5y ago
    Not sure if article said it, but you'll need to have trademarked your name prior to the domain registration date.
    • rcruzeiro 5y ago
      Do you have a source for that? I've been researching this but I got conflicting information.
      • slivanes 5y ago
        https://domainnamewire.com/category/policy-law/ https://domainnamewire.com/category/policy-law/ Should be enough examples and info there.
  • cushychicken 5y ago
    The .com domain still carries a lot of legitimate weight. I don't have the source handy but I read somewhere circa 2017 that 25% of all internet traffic is still direct navigation to .com domains. The corollary was that if someone was searching for a thing (say, "toilet seats"), there's still a sizable chunk of people who'd just type "toiletseats.com" into their browser and buy from whatever vendor pops up.
  • defaultname 5y ago
    .com is still preferable if you ever communicate a domain name in a manner where people will type it directly in. If you put an ad on a bus or on TV that says easymoney.io, for example, a large percentage of people will go to easymoney.com in their browser. If you ever see the copious ads for "free to play, no money" gambling sites during sports events or live broadcasts, and wonder how free-to-play gaming makes enough money for that to be worthwhile, note that the TLD they use for their free version will always be a non-.com TLD, but if you just replace that TLD with .com you'll be met with a full gambling site. One that would be illegal to advertise, and often operate, in the jurisdiction where you're seeing the free to play ads. It isn't accidental.
• JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  I’m surprised comments are saying it isn’t a thing. I was reading another thread a few days ago and people were saying it was very much a thing still and .com names were going for insane prices and limiting opportunities for real ideas and websites to be made. I feel like there should be some process where you have to put a real website at the domain name in a certain time period or you lose it. And I mean a real website not those godaddy placeholders. It’s just another rent seeking scam like we get in real estate without something like that.
  • horsawlarway 5y ago
    I think there's more nuance here - I have several domains (name related) that point to my router and serve solely private services, often on non-standard ports. They'll appear empty unless you happen to be scanning high-number random ports, but I'm using them and they're providing value to me.
  • CydeWeys 5y ago
    > I feel like there should be some process where you have to put a real website at the domain name in a certain time period or you lose it. And I mean a real website not those godaddy placeholders. I don't see how that would work; there's so many issues with it. For one, domain prices would have to be radically increased to handle all of the additional labor costs stemming from these manual verifications of domain usage (as you're talking about making a subjective determination rather than a technical one a la "does this domain have nameservers and is it responding over HTTP[S]"). Or, as an alternative, you might need to pay hundreds to thousands of dollars up front to cover the costs of such a claim when initiating it, as currently happens with ICANN UDRP/URS. Secondly, I own a domain that I've had for well over a decade but which is not currently serving a website because I grew tired of paying the hosting company's fees every year and let it expire. However, I am still using that domain for email. Should I lose that domain? Should I be required to spin up some fake content, but not too fake, just to "park" it correctly? What's the minimum level of BS content I'd have to put up there to not be susceptible to losing it? And lastly, this just opens huge avenues of abuse in favor of the domain squatters, as it gives them another avenue by which to hijack existing valid registrations from people. E.g. here's some example abuse of an existing ICANN system (UDRP/URS for trademarks): https://domainnamewire.com/tag/reverse-domain-name-hijacking/ https://domainnamewire.com/tag/reverse-domain-name-hijacking... Add another system to potentially take domains over, but with an even lower bar to use, and you'll see domain hijacking attempts explode in number. Meanwhile the actual domain parkers will be fine, as they'll improve their website autogeneration scripts just enough (maybe using GPT-3 or similar) to generate plausible content that would meet the bar and doesn't look like a mere parked page.
• liveoneggs 5y ago
  It's definitely stuff profitable if you get lucky but maintaining a portfolio of 100 .com's will eat up your potential profits on a nasty slow burn.
• dutchbrit 5y ago
  As someone who is experimenting with domain squatting, I have found it to be profitable up to this point. You just have to find good names that are expiring. Good available domains are getting harder and harder to find... Roughly 300% profit up til now.
  • w-j-w 5y ago
    I don't like you. You make money by stealing value, not creating any.
    • Max-20 5y ago
      Imagine how many awesome businesses we could have, if not all of the computer.com insurance.com etc would be squatted.
    • denton-scratch 5y ago
      Shame to personalise it, don't you think? He's just arbitraging. If "the system" leaves gaps across which you can trade for a 300% profit, then people will inevitably trade across those gaps and take the profit. Those people aren't bad people for doing that. If there's something to hate here, it's the system. The domain market is a very peculiar market. ICANN is a very odd organisation.
    • JimmyRuska 5y ago
      Like many things in life: hedge funds, renters, land as an investment. At the same time I'm sure some domains expire just because they're not used anymore. Sometimes I find it useful some guy hoarded it to sell for a small fee because they saw its value. The domains might have been harder to buy from some smaller mom and pop that grounded all their links to that domain.
  • layoutIfNeeded 5y ago
    I wish you a short life, and the inability to enjoy the fruits of your immoral venture.
    • 5y ago
• cushychicken 5y ago
  If you believe Peter Askew's writing, then yes, I do believe domain squatting is still a profitable venture. https://www.deepsouthventures.com/build-a-side-business/ https://www.deepsouthventures.com/build-a-side-business/
• JimmyRuska 5y ago
  I have a lot of domains. I think it is worth it if you develop the domains and interlink them. Especially on some of the growing marketshare TLDs. You've seen the massive growth on NFTs, and domains are just another scarcity asset. Eventually domains being auctioned for ethereum, even if they're on the alt TLDs like .dev and .app, will go for a lot of money. If you develop several sites with very decent domains as MVPs and interconnect them you can still make a killing.
• throwawaycities 5y ago
  I invest in domain names, probably about 100. More recently I purchased a few single character emoji domains (specifically country flags just so others couldn’t) and a few “crypto domains” which function as both web 3 domains and plain English ethereum wallet addresses. About 2 years ago I bought a lot of crypto themed domains seeing some of the secondary sales…the way I saw it if artificial scarcity is what gave cryptocurrency it’s value, then I’d rather invest in domain names that have a real use - like gold digging, the real money being in selling shovels. I recently listed a few for sale and almost immediately someone bought cryptocomicbook.com for $1,250 which I registered and renewed only once. However I almost feel like that purchase was part of a scam by the domain registrar to encourage me to register more domains through them. The number of domains is infinite, so the only real way to make money I think is to be able to buy/sell 2N or 3N domains or generic single word domains, but you probably need a big bank roll to get started in something like that, otherwise you just luck out buy owning something like ethereum.com.
• suby 5y ago
  I had a personal website where the URL was literally my full legal name. The domain would be of no interest to anyone other than me. I let it lapse around 2019 because I didn't want to pay for renewal, and figured I'd be fine leaving the site offline. Immediately upon letting it lapse it's bought by someone who I believe lives in Russia. They took my website, rehosted an old version found on archive.org, and then put advertisements on the site. It was not rehosted well, half of the links were broken. I wouldn't be surprised if he tried to embed malware on there too. I emailed the hosting company (DigitalFyre) with a DMCA request to get it taken down. Their support assured me they'd take it down but they never did. After a year of it being up the domain expired and I bought it back just to prevent someone else from doing the same. I figured it wouldn't be profitable for them so I made the decision to wait them out early on. I'm thinking the entire process is automated, where they'll buy up expired domains, rehost archived versions, and hope for either the previous owner to purchase it back or for ad revenue to make it worthwhile. Absolute scum of the earth.
  • downandout 5y ago
    The DMCA is treated as a joke by these companies. I helped a friend, who was being doxed on a domain comprised of his full legal name, where they were using photographs and other content that belonged to him, file a DMCA takedown request with Digital Ocean. They did absolutely nothing about it, other than sending a notification to the perpetrator that a complaint had been filed. These laws, like DMCA and the CDA, really need to be modified to impose more legal liability on service providers over situations like this. I know that many people on HN frown upon this view, but the gaping holes in these laws are enabling digital terrorism, extortion/blackmail, stalking, harassment, and copyright violations with no recourse for the victims.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • PaywallBuster 5y ago
      Should follow up with DO after a period (say 72h). A company that big would be in trouble to ignore DCMA notices. Could also try contacting upstream providers if worth the trouble.
• aurizon 5y ago
  Hello, How much are your domains? They are free Good, I will take them all. That is what low cost domains do - encourage hoarding. If a person had a valid use, then a renewal of $100 - 200, would be acceptable. However, he would not want to pay for something unused - this is much like old cars you see behind houses, ready to scrap - few have up to date licences. I feel that ICAAN should increase renewals to ~~$200 - which is a reasonable annual cost for something of value in use, but too expensive for something parked and rusting away. This would up-end the domain squatting business model - a model abetted by the people that control the web. Each country can set their and adjust it to rein in squatters. Another way is to traffic monitor (with some smarts) to cancel unused domains after a few months measured unuse. This would need some oversight, with a reclaim period of ~~6 months for a valid reason
• superasn 5y ago
  > some service registered it without any human supervision as that made up word holds no value to anyone else and I consciously decided to let it expire. I'm not an expert at this but some years back some SEO gurus were teaching to buy domains with age and already existing backlinks. I don't know if there is any truth to it (and i hope it doesn't) but could be one of the reasons why someone brought it.
• playcache 5y ago
  of all the scum that creep and crawl, domain squatters top them all.
• mysterydip 5y ago
  A couple years ago I heard a domain mentioned in a tv show episode and found out it wasn't registered. I snagged it partially for the novelty and partly to see if I would be contacted to purchase it back. I remembered years ago there was an incident on Conan's talk show where he offhandedly made up a dumb domain name and the network was forced to buy it so it didn't get bad things put on it. Well the show has since ended, and I got a handful of emails and comments from fans but nothing ever from the network itself. Still a fun experiment.
• trox 5y ago
  I'm shocked by how many commenters here sympathasize with the domain squatting/parking business. Sure it may be a fun side-project or profitable long-term investment. But trying to make money from people who actually create value is not really the future of the web I want to see.
  • encryptluks2 5y ago
    The solution IMO is a decentralized domain registry. Maybe we can even have a way for multiple people to own the same "domain" and pin the one they find most useful.
    • kota2 5y ago
      A decentralized registry is badly needed. More decentralized technologies are desperately needed.
    • thayne 5y ago
      DNS is decentralized. And having multiple owners of the same domain would be a phishing nightmare. Not to mention, how does the user determine which one to use?
      • encryptluks2 5y ago
        DNS is not decentralized in the manner you'd probably like to think. It has a centralized root authority. You could have a list of ICANN defaults if you are worried about anything changing
    • ohashi 5y ago
      multiple people owning the same domain is perhaps one of the worst ideas I've ever heard regarding the DNS. From a user perspective awful. Security perspective? Horrific. Marketing/branding perspective? Useless. Just... why? How could this even be a good idea?
      • encryptluks2 5y ago
• newdude116 5y ago
  I don't mind squatters in general. It seems like something many people would do. I have bought a domain name for a business 10 years ago for USD 500 from a former music band. But now, people often want 30k-50k per Domain. If you have a few hundred it may make sense to wait until you find an idiot. But I doubt that it is a very profitable business for many. It may be a long tail business. Many losers, a few make a killing.
• chasemiller 5y ago
  I think it's important to differentiate between domain name squatters and domain name investors. Squatters are typically registering trademarked names with the hopes of flipping them to the trademark holder, or registering accidentally expired domains names with the hopes of selling them back to the previous registrant (as in OP's case). This is wrong. Legitimate domain name investors are typically investing in generic words, brandables, or exact search term match domains. I used to get mad about domain investors having every name I wanted to use for a project, until someone analogized it to real estate investing. Everybody would open their store on Fifth Ave. in New York City if they could afford it. Unfortunately, storefronts there are very limited. This is basically what generic, one-word .com domains are (frequent sales of $1M+). Domain names are just digital real estate.
• apple4ever 5y ago
  I created my business with a not common name. There was a .com for it. I have been trying to buy it for 14 years. The person wants over $1500 for it, when I believe its only worth maybe $200. I check every year to see if it fails to renews, but no such luck. And the site is just squatted - at one point just ads and now just a "please buy me!". So since then I use other domains, with the full business name or .biz etc. It still annoys me from time to time.
• thayne 5y ago
  One potential solution is capping how much you can sell a domain name for. That reduces the incentives for squatting. That might cause other problems though, like making it more difficult to acquire a domain that someone else is already using, even if you are willing to pay a lot for it (but maybe that is a good thing?). Something that might specifically help with squatters buying lapsed domains is making it significantly more expensive to purchase a domain for some period of time (say a year) after the domain expires if you aren't the original owner.
• kypro 5y ago
  I was really into startups 10-15 years ago and at that time I would register a domain almost every few weeks. Back then it was much easier to get a decent .com and I've ended up keeping a few domains I really like because in the past I've regret letting good domains go which I later realised I wanted. You could say I'm squatting on those .com's as most of them are just empty sites. It's not so much that I'm trying to profit from them, but I still feel I have to squat on them because this is how the game is played. I know if someone offered me money for them I would probably sell, and I have thought about listing them in the past for this reason. I'm sure it's the minority of cases but I often wonder how many squatters are in a similar position to me. I've read a few stories about people buying .com's and it's very often cases like this where someone once had a great idea for a site but then never found the time or the money to execute on their idea so now they just keep hold of the domain for a better time. There's a lot of people being critical of squatters here, but if you own a domain which could potentially be worth several thousand dollars are you realistically just going to let it go and allow someone else to squat it and profit from your loss? If you're explicitly buying a domain to squat it then I'm more understanding of the anger, but even then this is just the game unfortunately. You deciding not to squat a domain doesn't mean it won't be squatted, in all likelihood it just means someone else will squat it and likely profit from your kindness. The solution here isn't to shame squatters but to remove the value domains have. Adding more top-level domains achieves this to some extent, but because .com's will probably always be considered the default domain by most internet users they will likely always demand big valuations. One potential solution I thought of in the past would be to crowd source domain resolution. Instead of a domain being something you buy, what if it was something we just agreed on? Although this idea probably works better in theory because in reality I'm sure those with resources will inevitably try to game the system or simply bribe users to get the domain they want.
• cloudking 5y ago
  I believe so, there are a few companies built around reselling brandable domains: https://www.brandbucket.com https://www.brandbucket.com https://www.squadhelp.com https://www.squadhelp.com
• uncomputation 5y ago
  Not sure about profitable, but it’s still definitely a Thing. Look at .eth domains for the most egregious case today. I just saw https://indiebrands.io https://indiebrands.io the other day. Basically a domain squatting operation but the guy operating it is convinced it is him that is creating the value rather than… you know… someone actually using the domain for something other than selling it. So, yes it’s still out there and just as obnoxious as ever