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Boulevard of Broken .dreams

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the pornforge dept.

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."

2 of 181 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This stuff isn't funny.... by SimplyCosmic · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. And it's killing Verisign by Animats · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.