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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).
”Is there rampant domain speculation, or do I just think of the same names as everyone else?”
Yes and yes.
#DeleteChrome
...prefixing with 'www.'?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Same as Land in the US, only tiny fraction is used while 100% is owned by someone. Domain names are just internet real estate, wouldn't expect it to be any other way.
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.
There are plenty of domains in heavy use for things other than the Web. Classifying these as "unused" is probably not right.
Just because a domain doesn't have a website doesn't mean that it isn't used for something.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
How many of these might be domains that are used only for email or other services other than www?
My last name isn't incredibly common, so I thought I would buy the .com domain. Turns out it is owned by Tucows who offers to rent it to me for $35 a year under their RealNames service. I contacted them about actually purchasing the domain outright and the response I received was that sale of their domain names start around $5000.
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
Probably 5 letter combinations too... https://whoapi.com/blog/we-are...
Years back I tried an experiment: put a domain name in a browser and not no response. Went to GoDaddy to register it and was told it was taken. Tried in the browser again and got a 'this address is for sale!' banner and an email to the address I had given GD offering to sell it to me within minutes. GD pretty much exists to suck up domain names people submit and then try to sell their idea back to them.
You don't understand: that is the equivalent of what AI is in 2019. In fact, this guy missed an opportunity to label his work as AI.
Man, I can't even get a name for my startup company, even furryballsploppedmenacinglyonthetableinc.com is being park squated by a registrar!
I wouldn't have guessed, but not too surprised when it showed that gambling sites were primarily in Chinese. What did surprise me was the same held true for porn sites. My guess is that the great firewall would filter those out, though that was just an assumption. if true, are those sites aimed at ex-pats? Just for research purposes only, I searched Google for the word "porn" and got 4.2 billion hits. Searching for the Chinese word for porn gave me 600 million. Then I searched for the Chinese word for pornography which gave more hits, 700 million. Interestingly, clicking on "images " for the Chinese word for porn showed almost all very explicit images, while the word pornography showed suggestively, but not explicit images. Searching in English is similar, but where porn gives you porn images, searching for pornography gives you mostly anti-porn images.
You are assuming that the silos can coordinate with each other efficiently.... Never the case in a mega corp....
Easier for the remote access team to set up their own domain than to try to navigate the waters necessary to open and maintain a sub-domain.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
I was going to make a joke about goatrape.com not being taken. Then i checked to make sure. That was a mistake.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.