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.

We can assume that with this public report of this topic, the amount of domains being tested at a time has at least stayed at the same level if not increased. Bob Parson’s article has some more up to date statistics, probably collected from zonefile information:

During the week of March 27 — April 2, 2006, 5,822,881 .COM names were registered. Of those names, only 455,918 .COM names were actually retained after the grace period expired.

Of the .COM names registered during the above week 5,366,963 – or 92.1% — were dropped during the grace period. Once again, at least 99% of these were dropped by registrars participating in the add/drop scheme.

So how is this possible? Registrars have a five day grace period for the registration of the domain in any gTLD. What this means is that a registrar can actually register a domain (at this point the registrar is charged) and then deleted it within the coming five days with a full refund. So this has lead to the practice of traffic testing/tasting domains:

A list of domain names is registered for a period from 1-5 days and then deleted again if the amount of traffic (or income) has not reached a certain threshold. Some of the testers will display a ‘parked page’ with PPC advertising and some of them will just display an empty page during the testing period. It is rumored that some registrars also offer this testing ability to their resellers & customers against a small fee per domain.

The original intention of the grace period was to allow the registrar to correct typos and this feature is also known to have been used to delete fraudulent registration attempts.
How do domainers come up with the names that are being traffic tested? They use lists of previously expired and deleted names as well as some of their own lists generated from dictionary information etc. Those are basically the same methods that domainers normally use, just that they normally do no get to actually test if there is any traffic – a name needs to be kept and paid for at least one year.

If you observe the testing cycles a little closer, you will actually also notice that some of the domains are re-tested multiple times. Basically it is safe to assume that any name that had been registered before and gets deleted, is registered again. If there’s any money to be made off the name, it’s unlikely to ever become available again.
What is the cost for the registry of doing this testing? There is is computing power used in registering the names and adding them to the zone files and deleting and removing the majority of them at a later point. I would also imagine that the registry operator needs to keep some information for accounting purposes in their database, so this would take up storage space as well. The registrar ends up paying only for the names that are kept, but also has to pre-fund the transactions during the time of the testing.

So far nothing has been done to prevent this traffic testing from happening, but there have been different suggestions (anything from ‘outlawing’ the pratice to charging fees for it) within the ICANN community.