Tomorrow’s Washington Post (I guess they publish their articles on early on their website) features an article on Domainers and the money they make. While the article does not distinguish enough between actual type-in traffic (for generic domains) and typos, the author appears to have done his research: He picked up on a current trend to make more out of those parked pages and also covers other trends from the industry, such as traffic testing and the growing trend to invest in valuable domains.
The Web’s Million-Dollar Typos

Some interesting quotes:

Industry analysts estimate that roughly 15 percent of all Web traffic originates this way.

Google won’t disclose how much revenue it is earning from ads on these types of sites, but chief executive Eric Schmidt said in an interview last week, “It’s a lot of money.”

Starting from an old article (dated July 21st, 2005) published at Computer Business Review, (and following a more recent entry on GoDaddy’s Bob Parson’s blog) I would like to touch a bit more on the topic of ‘traffic testing’ or ‘traffic tasting’ of domains. This topic has been discussed at ICANN meetings since last year and is also referred to by the name of ‘add/delete’ or ‘add/drop’ storms.

Pay-per-click speculation market soaring - Computer Business Review

(July 21st, 2005): There are close to a quarter of a million domain names a week being registered for just a few days, while people “test” the traffic potential of those names before discarding them, chief executive Stratton Sclavos (VeriSign) told analysts yesterday.

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The registry operator of .US and .BIZ Neustar/Neulevel announced on April 19th that they have entered an agreement to purchase UltraDNS for 61.8 Million US Dollars in cash. This will give Neustar access to an important piece of Internet Infrastructure, as UltraDNS operates the DNS for many large corporations, but also for 20 TLDs, including .ORG, .INFO, .IN, .MOBI and about 3,000 other customers.

Based on unaudited financial statements, UltraDNS’ 2005 revenue totaled $12.6 million and the company was profitable. For 2006, NeuStar projects revenue growth for UltraDNS services in excess of 40 percent, and expects the acquisition to be accretive by the first quarter of 2007, including the amortization of intangibles resulting from the acquisition.

• Neustar Press Release
• UltraDNS Press Release

Microsoft fights domain parking with their new Typo-Patrol, which is part of their Strider project. In other news: Microsoft uses domain parking to up their web server count and gains on Apache and Bruce Perens launches OpenSourceParking in order to add to the Apache webserver count.

In a preview page posted by Microsoft Research, they show some information about their new Strider Typo-Patrol. Their examples show parked domains (parked on Google’s Adsense for domains / Oingo, Domainsponsor and Sedo). In their examples they start off by mentioning a concern for adult ads under typos of family-type domain names, such as disnryland.com, which now appears to have been changed to a child friendly parking page. To protect users from “typo-squatters”, they have released their “Strider URL tracer” in order to protect your privacy. They will even protect you from traffic counting tools like Hitbox, Google Analytics and Webtrendslive.

Thinking about the history of Microsoft, their end user agreements and similar items, it seems quite surprising to me that they are now interested in protecting my privacy. Well, at least they want to protect me from their competitors. If you look at the detailed targeting available to advertisers in their new Adcenter, you know that they also like to hold data about you on their servers.

While Microsoft’s project is drawing a lot of attention they fail to mention how many of parked domains are actually hosted on their IIS server. As shown in the April web server survey by Netcraft, the domain Registrar GoDaddy has just moved 3.5 million hostnames from Linux to Windows. Since GoDaddy is one of the cheaper registrars, I would imagine that they also hold many parked domains - especially since GoDaddy parks all new registrations by default. Ah, and yes, not to forget: If you use their DNS, they take the free to park any sub-domain that you have not created a DNS entry for - basically they add “free” Wildcard DNS to your domain and point it to their own parking service.

And more related news: Bruce Perens announced that he has launched “OpenSourceParking.com“, a service designed to boost domain parking on open source software.

The project is a response to a large gain by Microsoft in the April Netcraft survey, with Windows’ share jumping 5 percent as domain registrar Go Daddy moved 4.5 million parked domains from Linux to Windows Server 2003.

So in order to correct the domain parking stats in the favour of the OpenSource webserver Apache, Perens is suggesting for everyone to park their unused domains on his new service, OpenSourceParking.com.

The first use of funds will be for operation of the parking facility: dedicated servers, bandwidth, 24/7 system administration. These are not large expenses. Programming and web design are donated. Funds in excess of that will be used to help create an effective PAC (political action committee) for Open Source / Free Software. Because it will be supporting a PAC, this project will not be eligible for IRS 501(c)3 non-profit status. A not-for-profit corporation will be organized when there are sufficient funds.

[via Netcraft, ZDNet and OSDir.com]

A while ago Witek from Dotcenter.com in Poland contacted me and asked me if I wouldn’t mind publishing a little profile for his website. Finally I have found the time to edit some of the text he wrote. I hope that his tools prove to be useful to some of my readers.

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Some of the large portfolio owners would like people to believe that all the good names are taken - which is probably true to a large part for the generic names. Finding the right name for your Internet start-up has become a major problem these days.
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