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How Many .com Domain Names Are Unused? (singaporedatacompany.com)
Christopher Forno, CTO at Singapore Data Company writes: When looking for .com names, I've been frustrated by how many are already taken but appear to be unused. It can feel like people are registering every pronounceable combination of letters in every major language, and even the unpronounceable short ones. Is there rampant domain speculation, or do I just think of the same names as everyone else? Let's look at the data.
There are currently 137 million .com domain names registered. Of these, roughly 1/3 are in use (businesses, personal websites, email, etc.), another 1/3 appear to be unused, and the last 1/3 are used for a variety of speculative purposes. I started by crawling a random sample of the domains from the top-level .com DNS zone file, until reaching 100,000 valid domains. [...] For most categories I've included a random sample of screenshots from that category, excluding redundant ones: Content (31% or ~43 million), Ads (23% or ~31 million), No Web Server (11% or ~16 million), Empty (9.2% or ~13 million), For Sale (7.1% or ~9.8 million), Error (5.7% or ~7.9 million), Parked (4.8% or ~6.5 million), Gambling (3.0% or ~4 million), Mail (2.6% or ~3.5 million), Redirect (1.1% or ~1.6 million), Private (0.64% or ~0.9 million), and Porn (0.59% or ~0.8 million).
There are currently 137 million .com domain names registered. Of these, roughly 1/3 are in use (businesses, personal websites, email, etc.), another 1/3 appear to be unused, and the last 1/3 are used for a variety of speculative purposes. I started by crawling a random sample of the domains from the top-level .com DNS zone file, until reaching 100,000 valid domains. [...] For most categories I've included a random sample of screenshots from that category, excluding redundant ones: Content (31% or ~43 million), Ads (23% or ~31 million), No Web Server (11% or ~16 million), Empty (9.2% or ~13 million), For Sale (7.1% or ~9.8 million), Error (5.7% or ~7.9 million), Parked (4.8% or ~6.5 million), Gambling (3.0% or ~4 million), Mail (2.6% or ~3.5 million), Redirect (1.1% or ~1.6 million), Private (0.64% or ~0.9 million), and Porn (0.59% or ~0.8 million).
A lot of servers we do security for have stuff at http://domain.com/employeeport... and http://domain.com/he/ or whatever, but nothing on the index page.
Another chunk are non-web servers. Domains aren't just for web sites, of course. Others are only accessible from certain networks and VPNs, something like DellTeamNet.com for Dell employees or whatever.
I wonder how many of the "empty", "error", "unused", and "no web server" are actually used - just not for a public web site with a normal index page.