Drop-Catching Domains Is Big Business

WebsiteMag brings us news from the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse (CADNA) about a recent study of drop catching —'a process whereby a domain that has expired is released into the pool of available names and is instantly re-registered by another party.' The eleven day study showed that 100% of '.com' and '.net' domain names were immediately registered after they had been released. CADNA has published the results with their own analysis. Quoting: "The results also show that 87% of Dot-COM drop-catchers use the domain names for pay-per-click (PPC) sites. They have no interest in these domain names other than leveraging them to post PPC ads and turn a profit. Interestingly, only 67% of Dot-ORG drop catchers use the domains they catch to post these sites — most likely because Dot-ORG names are harder to monetize due to the lack of type-in traffic and because they tend to be used for more legitimate purposes."

Comments

Make em expensive again

[mingot]

Make these fuckers cost 200 a year again. It'd likely cut out a LOT of bullshit.

Re:Make em expensive again

[suresk]

I agree. This is the only sensible way to solve this problem.

A while back, some friends and I were working on a business idea. Every single idea we had for a domain name was taken. I remember looking at all the sites to see what they had done with the domains, and out of 200 or so, fewer than 10 were actually doing something with the domain names aside from parking them and making money off the PPC ads.

As an example of this: I registered uresk.com (Uresk is my last name, and it is a very uncommon last name) back in 1997 or thereabouts. I was still in high school, and the $100/year ended up being prohibitively expensive so I didn't renew it. It has been passed around by speculators for almost a full decade now, despite the fact that it never had much traffic and "uresk" isn't a very common type-in. Bizarre.

Re:Make em expensive again

[debatem1]

Make it a $100 deposit refundable in 6 months.

Re:Make em expensive again

[Magic5Ball]

There's no need to raise the prices, just the initial commitment. $100 per domain name, which includes 10 to 20 years of registration, would be reasonable, and would also keep domain names from dropping in the first place (but at the increased risk of having their admin/billing/technical contacts become incorrect). Having been on this Internet thing for ages now, I find far fewer compelling technical reasons for domain names to expire than business (recurring revenue) reasons.

Re:Make em expensive again

[rtb61]

With a limited number of readily memorable and understandable words to be shared amongst hundreds of mliions of companies and individuals, there is no sane reason to allow squatters top mindlessly hoard hundreds of domain names and not use sub-domains. Australia is very strict with it's domain naming system and a company must have a registered business name prior to obtain a matching or nearly matching domain name.

For approximately 99% of the population it will have a positive effect and only the greediest 1% will have their activities curtailed, so is that inherently not the whole idea of appropriate legislation.

What needs to change

[FredFredrickson]

What needs to change is getting your domain back if you accidentally let it expire.

Just days after I accidentally let one of my domains expire with godaddy, they told me it's in a probation period where it was protected and only I could re-register it if it was a mistake- the catch was that it'd cost $80, as opposed to the $10 it normally costs.

That price is arbitrary, as it's no skin off their backs to re-register it for standard cost. They're banking on drop-catching. Drop-catchers snatch domains faster than I've been able to, even using godaddy's service that watches and grabs a domain the minute it expires.

Re:What needs to change

[D'Sphitz]

About 6 years ago there was a domain I found that was a month or so from expiring. I checked it every day and it wasn't ever renewed, it entered a hold period and presumably was going to be released to the public after n days (30 i think).

As the date approached I wrote a script to check the domain availability every 30 seconds, and alert me via email, phone, and loud annoying .wav file as soon as it became available. That never happened, it never officially became publicly available.

I emailed the new owner and his response was simply "$4000.00". It has now been parked for over 6 years rather than being used for a legitimate purpose.

I didn't know how the domain name business worked back then, but I learned then how sleazy it really is. These people are in bed with the registrars, and an individual who just wants a domain name less than 40 letters long is SOL.

Re:What needs to change

[vux984]

My registrar sends me email notices 2 months before mine expires, then again at 1 month, then a couple more times after that. They make it really hard to forget.

Actually, so does goddady. I get all kinds of reminders from them. They also have auto-renewal options.

I suppose the only way to blow it would be to have your contact address some spam catcher address you never check. But that's not godaddy's fault.

Re:What needs to change

[nprz]

My registrar automatically put my on the 'auto-renewal' and refused to take me off of it. I had cancelled my account with them and they were still trying to charge me for their 'auto-renewal' of my domain. That is the last time I pick a registrar because it is cheap.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Question: legality?

[ContractualObligatio]

Is it legal to just mass buy buildings and use them for profiteering?

Yes. Property speculation is an old business. But the prices are rather more than a few bucks for a property, and property rights do not suddenly expire. It's a very different situation, so your point isn't clear.

I agree that something like zoning laws would be great if the correct formulation is possible, but I don't see how raising the price above the easy profits threshold stops the normal guy. There were plenty of vanity registrations before the fees came down to the level they're at now. The advantage of a reasonable fee is that you don't have to worry about loopholes and freedom. What if someone wants a domain, it's been illegally parked, and it ends up costing them more than $100 to free up the domain, for instance? It's difficult to say that either approach (fees vs. zoning) is superior.

Bad idea

[TheLink]

I disagree.

The whole problem was the domain speculators hardly ever had to pay for the domains they parked on in the first place with the Domain Tasting and other stupidity that the ICANN allowed (or planned?). Imagine being able to "taste" a house and only pay for it when people wanted to rent/buy it, how stupid is that?

Now to fix the problem THEY caused, you are suggesting that we PAY THEM MORE?

I bet if the domain tasting idiocy is really gone for good, this crap will drop to a manageable level in a few years.

It's really fishy that people are conveniently suggesting this, just after a dubious source of revenue stream is drying up for the registrars.

Re:Bad idea

[suresk]

The more I think through the concept of domain testing and look at the statistics (wow!), the more I think you are probably right - getting rid of this available tactic will help a great deal.

Domain names (useful ones, at least) are a fairly finite resource, though, and it seems inefficient to require a fee to own the right to them that is so low that people will still speculate and squat at a fairly high rate. Yeah, tasting will reduce this by quite a bit, but you only need to make $10 or so per year for holding a domain name to be profitable, which means there will still be a ton of squatting and speculating. I see no other way to at least mitigate this problem than upping the fee a bit (like, say $25 - $50/year, nothing outrageous) so that squatting and speculation become less profitable.

All I want is the ability to register a .com that is at least somewhat useful and relevant to the topic of my site. As it is now, that is very hard to do (unless you like lots of dashes in your domain name, are good at making up catchy words, or are in a very niche market), and it kills me because the vast majority of names I want to use are used for ppc landing pages and nothing actually useful. If upping the fee isn't the answer, what is?

This article saved my domain

[donutello]

I had registered my domain with an email address that is no longer valid and a physical address where I no longer live. I had forgotten all about renewing it until I saw this article. Turns out my domain expires on Feb 7th and I was able to renew it (and update my contact information) in time!

the biggest offender may surprise you

[ILuvRamen]

Guess who the biggest offender is? WEB HOSTS! I lost my old domain because I had my old domain host use their registrar. And guess what happened when I didn't renew with they cuz they sucked? They re-registered it "for my convenience" and sat on. I had to go to .net instead! That should be soooooo illegal under monopoly/anticompetition laws.

The real problem is phony "registrars"

[Animats]

Most of the "ICANN accredited registrars" are fronts for domain tasting. There are only a few real registrars; the rest are dummies for picking up dropped domains. Enom has a huge number of dummy fronts - "Enom1, Inc" through "Enom469, Inc".

One step needed is for ICANN to enforce the provision of the registrar agreement which allows ICANN to prohibit registrars from owning or speculating in domains. And the provision which requires that a registrar have assurance of payment before activating a domain. With that, the end of the "grace period", and Google refusing to monetize domains for the first five days, we should see this problem decrease. The .org TLD recently got rid of their grace period, and domain transactions dropped 90%.

We're working on this from the browser end. The general idea of our SiteTruth system is to filter out the bottom-feeders. It's the next step after ad-blocking - make the link pages, directory pages, typosquatters, and similar junk far less visible.

It's not even clear that advertisers benefit from all those junk pages. If you advertise with Google ads, and get clicks from junk pages, do they really result in sales? Or is this just a way to take money from the real advertiser and divert it to some bottom-feeder?

What about laws?

[grumbel]

We have trademark laws, we have copyright laws, we have laws that deal with telemarketing, why not have laws that deal with domain grabbing?

Re:Tasting may be on the way out

[Anonymous Coward]

There's nothing wrong with parking. The web is not the internet. My domain has a parked website, because I'm using it for e-mail. What gives you the right to complain?

My family name had this happen.

[Anonymous Freak]

I own the .org and .info domains of my last name. A distant cousin owned the .com. He let it lapse, and it was picked up by a domain squatter instantly. They want over 500 Euro for the domain. Which is silly, since my last name is so uncommon, there are only 40-ish people in the WORLD with my last name. None of us are famous, none of us own a business with our family name in it. (There are a few of us who own businesses, but none with our name in it.)

I've waited three years for the name to expire, but they keep re-registering it. I've told them outright that I'm willing to pay $35, and that's it. By my measure, they'll hit that mark in their own spending next year.