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66.3 Million Domain Names Registered
IO ERROR writes "VeriSign announced that 5.1 million new domains were registered in the third quarter of 2004, and that there are now 66.3 million active domain names, both the highest numbers ever. It also said that the percentage of domains registered to live Web sites has increased and country code top-level domains are becoming more widely accepted."
I wonder how many have actual content or don't redirect to another site. There are so many names out that that are bought up by corporations that all point to the same ste and so many others that try to capitalize on user stupidity and are just mispellings of popular cites.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
I bet most of this year's domains have been registered by the automated scripts which watch for domain expiry and jump in and register the domain from underneath the owner.
I've seen this happen in no more than a day. It's very annoying, and means people have to move their sites elsewhere and deal with the old site now being at best a page full of adverts and at worst a redirect to some weird porn.
I am so jaded.
/godaddy believer now
The first thing I thought about when I saw this... what is VeriSign trying to pull now.
Add below the most silly domain name you've encountered so far ! this one is a nice start
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
VeriSign announced that 5.1 million new domains were registered in the third quarter of 2004
The representative then added "Approximately 58% of these are phishing sites."
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
What a milestone. Or not? Is it any wonder that now there are more registered names than before? Would you expect inverse? Let's post this kind of stuff every month!
And then - I'm sure they are counting only 2nd level names, right? And country-specific names are not included, are they? informatics.uni.edu and economics.uni.edu are counted as one? the-company.com and thecompany.com are counted as two?
Finally - what constitutes a "live" web-site? "Under construction" counts? And why a web-site? Is there a rules that every resolved domain name should have a web-server at port 80?
Somebody told you you were one in a million?? I laugh at you lack of uniqueness. I have one domain name... This means I am one in 66.3 million.... Go figure... :)
Apple built a platform for their ideas, Google built one for everyone's.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but here in the Netherlands our country-code TLD (.nl) is far more accepted than .com or .net. People have more trust in it because this TLD can only be registered by "legit" companies.
I'm trying to improve my English. Please correct me on any spelling/grammar errors in this post.
"and country code top-level domains are becoming more widely accepted"
I'm sure this acceptance has arisen mainly from everyone's favorite Christmas Island website and it's hypnotizing void.
IMHO the greatest internet-related quote ever, and one that I will post at any remotely relevant opportunity (forgive my bad memory for inaccuracies)
Karl: "Hey Homer! You got the #1 non-adult-oriented website!"
Lenny: "...which makes it 10 trillionth overall!"
stuff |
i'm sure most people will still go for a .com before everything else.
Is there an alternative to GoDaddy that is just as cheap but doesn't force you to go through all those annoying ads on the way to the checkout counter?
Eric
The number of domain names used for hosting adult content, was reported to have hit the 50 million mark.
Maybe it's because the old domains never die. These god awful search sites and other squatters just buy them all up. I use to own the domain name jeremylogan.com (my name), since I let it die two different domain squatters have bought it up as soon as it was available. I'm really beginning to think we ought to have to justify our domain names in some fashion.
If you need a little help being convinced just check out http://manpage.com/ and tell me THAT URL couldn't be put to some real use.
Jeremy Logan's Website.
until Netcraft confirms it.
I used to have 10 domain names and last year I sort of realized I had no need for all of them and only kept 3 and left the rest expired. I have a hunch many people are doing the same after all those years of domain hoarding glut.
Seriously... Do we all really need www.iaml33tyouarenot.org with several varients of it with dashes inbetween in all country codes?
Google - Searching 8,058,044,651 web pages
8bn/65m is 123 and a bit. So that means that all the websites average out at 123 (cached) pages. When you think the BBC boasts half a million pages, and sites such as zdnet, cnet etc have hundreds of thousands, just think how many sites only have 1 page. What a waste of domain!
Get paid to search..It's geniune and
Well, the second biggest TLD in numbers of registered domains is the .de domain for some time now (I don't know for how long... one year, two years ?). And both .uk and .nl aren't small fish either.
The DENIC (the registry for the german .de TLD) has an interesting
graph showing the number of domains in the ten biggest TLDs (in english).
I myself have been dumb enough to first enquire about a few (nosoup4u.com/nosoup4u.net) ; only to find out the hard way it had been registered only a couple days later.
If the site(s) would at least be used, it wouldn't be too disturbing to me... but since it's only registered, to be bought over by the highest bidder...
I also know it's very hard to regulate this ; and even harder to 'check' if someone is really 'using' a site ; As , after all, someone could be using it (without my knowledge) purely to use it for, eg. FTP transfers, and not a website.
Still, it gives me a sour taste in my mouth.
That's not what "squatting" is. If a domain has fully expired, the original owner doesn't "own" it anymore.
Note that for it to be taken by someone else, that means it was deleted from the registry which takes a full 45 days minimum! Anyone who doesn't notice their domain is down for 45 days, never really cared about it in the first place - remember they could have gotten it back in those 45 days.
include pictures of some ladies cat or some family's newborn baby. http://fromthemorning.blogspot.com/
[FromTheMorning]
While that's true (for the gtld registries) I still don't like the idea that thousands of otherwise-available domains are pointing at random advertising sites that nobody cares about.
Regardless of whether or not this "should" be done, the fact is that these scripts can register domains much more rapidly than any human can directly -- they just go for anything which has just expired. This would at least partially account for a spike in domain registrations, much as scripts for registering common typos do.
My point was mainly that it's due to the rise of automated registration scripts that registration has spiked.
(Side note: I'd define "squatting" as sitting on any domain providing a "service" that no-one really wanted, preventing a more relevant service from taking that name. Early on this was done on trademarks, and now it's done on expired domains. Either way, the result is lots of domains that can't be used because they are attached to rubbish. If you don't like that, then never mind. The term used doesn't really matter.)
Wasn't it policy back in the dark ages (I seem to remember it from '88-'90 or so) that you could get one (and only one) domain name per company. headache.com and constipation.com wouldn't both go to Johnson & Johnson or some other drug company; you'd have just johnson-and-johnson.com.
Is this a false memory? I also seem to recall that microsoft.com had just launched its MSN service to go head-to-head with Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL. And to get the domain name msn.com, didn't they create a small business just down the street from the main campus, something like Micro Solutions Networking (MSN)? I swear I could remember doing a whois on it in like '92 or so and seeing the highly suspicious street address.
country code top-level domains are becoming more widely accepted.
Speaking of country code TLDs, anyone know for sure when .eu will become available? I've been waiting for that for a year now.
.coms are running out. .nets too. that leaves... .biz!
The fastest growing registrar happens to be GoDaddy.com, where I moved all my domains to several years ago.
You have to keep watching that bang/buck ratio in registrars, webhosting - in all things. You stay with one provider of anything too long and chances are you'll end up paying higher static prices for the convenience of not looking around at the competition once in a while...
Power to the Peaceful
I mean, in this day and age you have to be a complete baffoon to let your domain expire. My registrart ( GoDaddy.com ) sends me notices about it needing renewal 1 month, 1 week,3 days, and 1 day before expiry. I imagine other registrars are simmilar - after all, they want you to renew with them.
How can you not notice all these??? If you let the date slip by after all these, then you don't care baout the domain very much, or are a moron. Or both.
Yep it does p*** me off with all the squatters around one typo and popup hell if you're on the wrong comp with wrong browser. But even I've owned my share of unnecessary domain names just in case ;) no real money made though (hundreds of euros not thousand anyways).
Hell the more domains the better even though it feels a bit like a redlight district sometimes stuck inside some techno IT ghetto
i have a really bad habit of buying domain names while drunk. there's nothing like 6 pints of beer to make me think 'i wonder if that is registered...' all they seem to do is generate spam for me! :(
I think those figures are misleading. What about those registrars that automatically generate a home page for you? Are those included in the tally? And what about squatters that just put up a generic search page? There's too many variables for those numbers to be very useful.
AnimeNEXT anime convention
With the increasing number of people switching to broadband, and the availability of personal servers like The Net-Box, obtaining and using a domain for one's home is not only easy and affordable but also reasonable. I believe that a big share of the domain registrations is for home/personal use and that the numbers will continue to increase.
the-center-of-the-internet.com (about 1996)
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
I would be willing to bet that most of them are URLs for spamvertised websites. Oh SURBL how I love thee.
Are they claiming 66.3 million .com/org/net domains are registered or ALL Top Level domains ?
This is relevant.
I've always wondered why we *have* these TLDs and country domains. I know that in the early days they helped parse traffic and what not, but nowadays, with so much crap out there on the web, why not just have domain names? i.e. 'cartoonnetwork' rather than 'cartoonnetwork.com'? That way, a business (like Dell and IBM) could just register 'Dell' and 'IBM' ... Make the domain name the TLD. Seems easy enough to me. (I know there's probably a reason we have TLDs, but I'm just being hypothetical.) =)
... Here's an idea: why don't the Registrars perform an extended SoundEx() on domain names in their database? If I wanted to register cartooonnetwork.com, the Registrar simply shouldn't let me. Or if I wanted to register delll.com or ibmm.com. Or even Barrbie.com ... ('The domain name you requested too closely resembles an active domain.') I know that for the Registrars, they don't care, as long as they get money. But it costs companies and users who then have to spend more money defending a copyright or trademark, etc. If I *really* wanted the domain, it should then send a notice to the existing domain and request permission. But it would certainly cut down on porn sites. I'm getting tired of mistyping google.com and getting slapped with spyware, porn, and miscellaneous crap that I don't want to see. (Well, the porn is okay, but when I *ask* for it. *grin*)
At that
*shrug* If only if the world was written according to me. =)
Seth Anderson BTW, I'm not 23 anymore -- I am TexasCowboy26 now. =)
Of course, if Verisign had its own way it would reinstate SiteFinder meaning that technically there would be an infinite number of domain names registered.
If only someone would tell the guy that writes cdrecord that he could get his own domain name.
y ee s/joerg.schilling/private/cdrecord.html
http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/emplo
A musician without the RIAA, is like a fish without a bicycle.
we now expect that of that 66 million, 90% are probably like this and not as they should be.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
66.3 million domain names registered... ... and half of those by Russian spammers.
The more advanced the technology, the more open it is to primitive attack
They own millions of good domains that people cant use because they are being squatted on. ICANN should put their foot down and do something about it. Now there are no names left hardly to take since they are all claimed by these stupid sites that get visits by people mis-spelling a URL or a site they used to visit.
Examples:
A funny Nintendo related site I used to love: http://www.nintendoclassics.com/
The company that made Tuxracer: http://www.sunspirestudios.com/
Shit like this just pisses me off.
http://www.linkfarm.org/
http://www.linkfarm.com/
Heirachy affords a lot of flexibility in naming.
What's so sacred about 'one dot' names anyway?
People seem to have no trouble remembering bama.edebris.com so why should I mess with trying to register and having to pay for thisbethebamayoubelookingfor.com?
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
And if you did any of the above, and you failed to remember to renew the domain, then it's your own damn fault. It sure as hell isn't the registrars.
SO,
FACT: With 86,400 seconds in one day, and 365.25 days in one year, there are 31,557,600 seconds in one year.
Under the supposition that a program were written that would allow one second to auto-load a URL into a browser, an average of 5 seconds to resolve and load a page on a standard ADSL connection, and one second to view the loaded page before repeating the process (7 seconds total), ~66,300,000 web pages could be viewed in 464,100,000 seconds.
Dividing these seconds by the seconds in one year indicates that it would take roughly 14.7 years to perform a check on every website.
Of course, this assumes that I Don't have to take roughly 31.3 seconds to close all the pop-up windows that the google toolbar missed, and that I have all the URLs.
(My God, I have too much time on my hands.)
Well, my next post will be in 2019, I suppose. ;)
I think that is the problem. People do have trouble remembering which site each domain is in. Here in the UK, people get mixed up with .co.uk and .com all the time, which has meant that most UK companies have invested in .com domains to catch the confused. Supermarket chain Iceland even briefly rebranded their company to be called iceland.co.uk even on the realspace shops and bags to try to drive the idea home. I'm sure many people have made the mistake of going to the site about Iceland that lives at Iceland.com at least once. Competitor Tesco just registered both because their name isn't a country. :)
I'm sure that even in the US, most people's exposure to domain names is via advertising, and most organisations advertising are companies. Therefore the most common domain they see is .com, and they just come to assume that everything ends in .com without really knowing what that abbreviation means.
On our network more often I see them for irc kiddies than anything else (vainity domains). They will take the free or low cost offer of a registrar and then let it expire since by the time its time to pay, they are bored with it.
.tv, they might get watching.tv and make their irc domain
t v
like
was.screwing.your.wife.while.you.were.watching.
and other silly shit like that.
Remember when the original ICANN handed VeriSign the domain registration monopoly, at $50:year? That would be $30B:year now! We're so much better off now that registration is decentralized, and it costs $3B:year industry! For serving DNS!
--
make install -not war
Repeat after me.
DNS is *NOT* a search engine!
ICANN *should* do something, but I'm afraid they won't. What would be interesting, is get the popular popup blockers to also block domains that don't have any real information, such as Domain Parked websites, domains for sale messages, etc and get rid of all the damn traffic they grab by parking the domains. Or go back to making domains $150 a registration, instead of 6 bucks (maybe opening up registration to everyone was a _bad_ move). I would certainly think twice about registering 100 domains at $150 each, but 6 bucks?
There are 10 types of people in the world; those who can read binary, and those who can't.
I recently worked for a company that was turning into nothing but spammers - they were registering 50~100 new domains *per WEEK* to use for bulk email.
Just because there are X domains registered doesn't mean that they're actually being used for anything useful.
Is there a place to see the currently registered domains? I found a place that would sell me the list for $50 but for what I'm interested in that's excessive. Just .com would be good for me. thx
This tells me that there are 66.29 million ways to say: get PrOn here
Could somebody get me a list?
Step 1. Invent new Catchphrase
Step 2. Register Domain Name [Catchphrase].com
Step 3. Shamelessly plug your catchphrase to the universe
Step 4. Profit!!!
Note that for it to be taken by someone else, that means it was deleted from the registry which takes a full 45 days minimum! Anyone who doesn't notice their domain is down for 45 days, never really cared about it in the first place - remember they could have gotten it back in those 45 days.
This hasn't always been the case. In 2001 or 2002, my domain expired while I was on a 2 week military TDY and my stupid registrar did not automatically rebill my credit card. When I got home, my domain belonged to the vile netster and it has been so ever since.
How many domains do you own?
-- 1
-- 2-5
-- 6-10
-- 11-25
-- 26-100
-- I'm a registrar, you insensitive clod!!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Ah, there you go. I wondered when someone would get to THAT (btw, put "adult content" in quotes, huh? Ain't all that "adult" and has about as many kids looking as adults!). If you are a blogger, you probably get comment spam every day, up to 300 or 400 sometimes, all reflecting new domains trying to get around spam blacklisting and cleansing by bloggers, etc.
I figure, the money spent (course, its a lot less that it was but a year or two ago) on all those domain registrations shows how much profit is in the "adult content" and drugs-online, and online gambling business!
Alcaide's Cafe,