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).

Comments

Wonder how many empty and error just don't have in

[raymorris]

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.

Re: Squatters

[Dynedain]

Back in the first internet boom (when we wore onions on our belts since it was the style at the time) a startup registered the 20,000 most common US surnames as .com domains. They were selling email accounts. In the inevitable bankruptcy the whole thing was sold to Tucows.

Re:How do they know it's not in use?

[dissy]

How do they know it's not in use?

He says if no web-server was running, he went by DNS records.

Just because a domain doesn't have a website doesn't mean that it isn't used for something.

From his report, he has two categories for "No A record but does have MX" and "No MX record but does have A records with no apparent web server"

Mail (2.6% or ~3.5 million)
Any domain not in any other category, but with MX DNS records (for email), I categorized as Mail. I did not attempt to see if the mail server was working or if delivery was possible. It's possible that many of these domains are not actually used for email, but I've given them the benefit of the doubt.

No Web Server (11% or ~16 million)
If I was unable to connect to, or receive a valid response from, port 80 or 443 for either the top-level domain or the www subdomain and the domain had no MX records, I placed the domain in this category. Some of these domains likely have some non-web use, such as an FTP or video game server, but I expect them to be a small fraction. Additionally, the crawling server was only configured for IPv4, so any IPv6-only websites would have been grouped here.

It would seem all the other categories were determined from data returned by a web server.

goatrape.com

[jwhyche]

I was going to make a joke about goatrape.com not being taken. Then i checked to make sure. That was a mistake.