At least in the past they would “kite” or “taste” the domain - register it and then cancel before the grace period - so it was no cost to them. It’s been a whil

At least in the past they would “kite” or “taste” the domain - register it and then cancel before the grace period - so it was no cost to them. It’s been a while since I’ve looked into that space and don’t know if that’s still a common practice. It should be noted that GD had a kiting operation, but then paused it, after which the original owner publicly decried the practice very publicly. The company has since been sold and I would wager that the opportunity was too profitable to ignore. Source: I built the analytics system for parked domains that was used for pricing early GD domain auctions as well as the initial integration with Adsense for domains.