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This is old news, ICANN ended "domain tasting" via the 5-day grace period in 2009 by charging additional fees for those that engage in the practice: http://www

by vladd 14y ago

This is old news, ICANN ended "domain tasting" via the 5-day grace period in 2009 by charging additional fees for those that engage in the practice: http://www.icann.org/en/news/announcements/announcement-12aug09-en.htm http://www.icann.org/en/news/announcements/announcement-12au... There are 104,419,043 .com domains out there [1] and GoDaddy claims to have registered over 53 million domains (non-.com extensions included) - what are the chances of a new domain being registered with GoDaddy? If GoDaddy were to do domain tasting they would go bankrupt pretty soon. [1] http://www.dailychanges.com/ http://www.dailychanges.com/

InclinedPlane 14y ago
Domain tasting used to be easy money for spammers. Simply "taste" a huge number of domains, such as misspellings of popular sites, and put typically ad-filled domain parked pages on them. Figure out which ones make money and which don't, register the ones that are profitable, let the others lapse, and move on.
- wdr1 14y ago
  Or simply let them expire & then start another 5 day period... over & over & over again. Sadly, this did happen.
  - InclinedPlane 14y ago
    Yeah, either way it's win/win. The only constraint is the cost of hosting, which can easily be amortized over all of your sites.
mistercow 14y ago
That actually doesn't fix the problem as far as registrars are concerned, because the fees only apply if you get refunds above a threshold of 10% of the domains registered. That puts registrars in a uniquely advantageous position for tasting because they register so many domains. Here's a strategy a registrar could use. For a given 10 minute period, you take the number of domains actually bought by customers, and call that X. Then you multiply that by 10% and call that Y. Now, you take all of the domain searches for unregistered domains that have come through you within that 10 minute period, and run them through a machine learning algorithm that ranks them by the likelihood that they will be purchased. You take the top Y of that list, and taste only those. Now you are guaranteed not to exceed the threshold where you start getting charged for deleted domains. I am not sure how this strategy would work if the end registrant gets a refund. It may be that that ends up adding to the registrars own tally of refunds, but it would be trivial to tweak the above strategy to decrease Y to adjust for customer refunds, with a controllable amount of uncertainty which can be optimized to maximize the profitability of the strategy over the long run.

by vladd 14y ago

InclinedPlane 14y ago

Domain tasting used to be easy money for spammers. Simply "taste" a huge number of domains, such as misspellings of popular sites, and put typically ad-filled domain parked pages on them. Figure out which ones make money and which don't, register the ones that are profitable, let the others lapse, and move on.

wdr1 14y ago
Or simply let them expire & then start another 5 day period... over & over & over again. Sadly, this did happen.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  Yeah, either way it's win/win. The only constraint is the cost of hosting, which can easily be amortized over all of your sites.

mistercow 14y ago

That actually doesn't fix the problem as far as registrars are concerned, because the fees only apply if you get refunds above a threshold of 10% of the domains registered. That puts registrars in a uniquely advantageous position for tasting because they register so many domains. Here's a strategy a registrar could use. For a given 10 minute period, you take the number of domains actually bought by customers, and call that X. Then you multiply that by 10% and call that Y. Now, you take all of the domain searches for unregistered domains that have come through you within that 10 minute period, and run them through a machine learning algorithm that ranks them by the likelihood that they will be purchased. You take the top Y of that list, and taste only those. Now you are guaranteed not to exceed the threshold where you start getting charged for deleted domains. I am not sure how this strategy would work if the end registrant gets a refund. It may be that that ends up adding to the registrars own tally of refunds, but it would be trivial to tweak the above strategy to decrease Y to adjust for customer refunds, with a controllable amount of uncertainty which can be optimized to maximize the profitability of the strategy over the long run.