Boulevard of Broken .dreams

kubla2000 writes "Salon has a fascinating article up examining the detritus of the dotcom craze of registering anything and everything as a domain name. This is, by turns, a tragic and hilarious piece... there's an irrisistable pathos to the fact that "FreeRoofTile.com" has expired as well as an urge to take a clue-bat to whoever "thought" to register it in the first place."

Comments

Re:This stuff isn't funny....

[SimplyCosmic]

One thing I noticed happening a couple of years ago was that as soon as a domain with even a minimum amount of traffic or visibility in search forums expired, it was quickly purchased by a porn site.

At one time, no doubt, that was a valid site about civil wars, but the domain owner let it expire, and it was snatched up because it probably came up high on a search engine for it's term.

I wouldn't be surprised to find out that several of the larger porn site chains either have deals with several domain registars to let them move in pretty quickly on bulk expired domain snatching, or that there's a small company out there that makes money with scripts that watch for new domain expirations, then checks to see what their google.com ranking is, calculates a set fee based on potential "accidental traffic" from people going to the site and then offers a large number of such site names to a porn chain.

Just more reason for me to go to google first for whatever I'm looking for, rather than bother with a "search by typing a term as a domain". And yet another reason why domain names are rapidly losing their value based on their name.

Sadly people are still "making" money out of this

[sambo99]

I guess the all forgot to use the Evan's system when they registered there domains :)

Keyword stuffing

[bsd-mon]

LOL. I'm the (former) dns master of ChristmasTree-ChristmasTree-ChristmasTree-Christma sTree.com, and our company specializes in search engine rankings, so let me tell you about keyword stuffing. Of course no one expects to type this domain in, but when it comes up 1 or 2 in $search_engine_of_choice, they just click the returned result. Then I'm the poor sap who also has to re-register said domains. (And you want to talk about niche markets? How about 2brsanibelislandfloridabeachfrontmidpricedvacation condo.com?)

Salon doesn't understand the internet.

[ivan256]

I know that, though ultimately unexpressed, each expired URL represents a discrete idea deemed good, or at least good enough, at the point of inception to justify its registration fee.

We've always known that salon doesn't really understand the internet, but here is proof. If you fall into the trap of thinking that the only thing the internet is good for is commerce, then you are practically guaranteed to lose money.

Not only that, but an expired domain name can mean that it has served out it's usefulness. Sites don't have to live forever. Who said that that an expired domain means that some idea went unexpressed. Hell, most of those domains were probably registered by some idiot taking part in the domain name "Land Grab", and was hoping to resell them later at a huge markup. Most names were probably registered because the random collection of letters happened to make some sense in english, and contained a buzzword (like "free"). There were no broken dreams here, just idiocy, and I don't feel too badly for the greedy bastards who blew $200 million trying to make a quick buck with something they couldn't even bother to take the time to try and understand.

Now I remember why I usually don't even bother reading salon.

And it's killing Verisign

[Animats]

Look at Verisign's stock. High of around $200, currently around $5. Domain names are not being renewed, they have heavy price competition from other registrars, and growth is negative. Verisign's current rate of losses is around $120 million per year. I had Verisign on Deathwatch years ago. Their cash position has improved since then, but they've downsized. They now have more than a year of cash, so they can probably hang on for a while. But if you invested in Verisign stock, you lost most of your money, so they belonged on Deathwatch.

GreatDomains (a Verisign acquisition) is a joke. As I've mentioned previously, there's a huge difference between asking prices (often five figures) and actual sales prices (a few hundred dollars). Right now, you can probably buy almost any unused domain on the Internet for under $200.

Back when there was the big push for additional top-level domains, I pointed out that they were unnecessary. And, in retrospect, we didn't need ".biz", or ".info"; we had ".com" and ".net", and they did the job. Having more TLDs was just a moneymaker for registrars, not something useful.

It's all Esther Dyson's fault. She insisted, when she headed ICANN, that there had to be more TLDs, and that whether there should be more TLDs wasn't open to discussion. She was wrong.