DomainEditorial » Observations

Direct Navigation Live

admin — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 16:12:51 +0000

I have been traveling quite a bit in the last three weeks, so I also ended up spending some time in a business centre of a hotel where a teacher’s conference was taking place. Imagine two female teachers sitting in front of the computer (and me sitting at the next table with my laptop). So one says to the other (they had just entered “.org” into the browser) “Try .com”. Up comes a parked page. “Scroll down, maybe it’s further down”. They had no idea they had landed on a parked page. Always good to experience this live.

Buydomains names not on eBay anymore

admin — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 20:20:17 +0000

Buydomains/NameMedia had some of their domain names listed on eBay, as I reported earlier. Apparently they have pulled the listings, as the store has been closed according to the website.

Can’t find a name? Drop a vowel!

admin — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 18:10:37 +0000

Antony over at NamesAtWork has found a solution for the lack of good names available for registration today: Drop the last vowel. Of course many companies are already on the bandwagon, you so you better hurry up, before your reduced name is gone as well.

Well, somehow after Flickr it does not seem all to original anymore. Plus, do you attract more people that cannot type properly? Another naming fad comes and goes, true generics increase their value.

On CyberSquatters and Whois Privacy

admin — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 20:15:49 +0000

There have been many recent public comments that consider all domainers cybersquatters. I have been meaning to comment on that – as you might imagine I do not quite agree. But here’s an article, where I could not hold off commenting on – this time against whois privacy.

On CNET the lawyer Doug Isenberg tells us that ICANN needs to clamp down on domain name abuse. Of course he also had to use the “Cybersquatter” word: Today, cybersquatters have rebranded themselves as “domainers.” Mr. Isenberg also is a panelist for WIPO.

Some rumors and public data lead me to believe, that the author of the article, Doug Isenberg, is also the owner of the domain “couponcodes.com”. So let’s take a closer look: On DomainTools.com, we found an old whois record showing the following owner (from March 2006):

DOLESCO LLC
5310 South Trimble Road
ATLANTA, Georgia 30342
United States

Registered through: GoDaddy.com
Domain Name: COUPONCODES.COM
Created on: 06-Dec-99
Expires on: 06-Dec-07
Last Updated on: 16-Jan-05

Administrative Contact:LLC, DOLESCO doug@isenberg.net
5310 South Trimble Road
ATLANTA, Georgia 30342
United States
404 256 4334 Fax –

Alexa also lists him as the owner of the site, if you seach for his main site, GigaLaw.com:

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=Gigalaw.com

Today the whois of this domain is protected with Whois Privacy, which he also mentions in his article: http://www.iwhois.com/couponcodes.com

Also “couponcodes.com” seems confusingly similar to “couponcode.com“, which also is a registered trademark:

The domain currently is serving ads from SiteLauncher.

Whois privacy also helps to protect site owners from receiving spam, so of course this is a double-edged sword. If there is a valid legal complaint, any registrar will lift the whois privacy veil, so I do not really see the big problem here.

[via CNET/News.com / DomainNameWire]

Canadian Government vs. Speculators

admin — Sat, 13 May 2006 05:45:26 +0000

Apparently someone at the Canadian Government has paid attention. On top of registering census2006.ca for the survey of the Canadian population which takes place every 5 years, they also secured some of the domains for future surveys. They even thought of registering some of the available counterparts in other TLDs (some of them with an invalid phone number, by the way). The budget apparently also included the purchase of some PPC ads.
Let’s count the score (I am looking for all domains matching the pattern “census2???” in some TLDs and included some additional variations (there are more)):

Canadian Government:

census2001.ca
census2004.ca
census2006.ca
census2006fr.ca
census2011.ca
census2016.ca
recensement2001.ca
recensement2004.ca (ed. did they have a seperate one in French that year?)
recensement2006.ca
recensement2011.ca
recensement2016.ca
recensement2001.com/net/org/info
recensement2004.com/net/org/info
recensement2006.com/net/org/info
recensement2011.com/net/org/info
recensement2016.com/net/org/info
census2004.com/net/org/info
census2006.com/net/org/info
census2011.com/net/org/info
census2016.com/net/org/info

Others:

census2000.ca
census2006fr.ca
census2007.ca
census2008.ca
census2009.ca
census2010.ca
census2021.ca
census2026.ca (ed. hmmm, looks like they missed census2031.ca)
census2036.ca (ed. or is it going to switch to once every 10 years?)
census2046.ca
census2000.com
census2001.com
census2002.com
census2005.com
census2007.com
census2010.com
census2020.com
census2030.com
census2040.com

census.ca is owned by emall, the guys who just sold almost 400 domains to Yellow Pages.

How does traffic testing/tasting work?

admin — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 04:30:59 +0000

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.

Microsoft fights domain parking / Microsoft uses domain parking to up their server count

admin — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 23:36:43 +0000

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]

All the good names are taken?

admin — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 04:37:22 +0000

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.
The cost of creating an Internet startup has significantly dropped these days: Hardware, Bandwith and Development (for example based on OpenSource software) have become much cheaper. Now if you want to add a nice generic one word domain to the mix, it can significantly increase your cost. Getting the additional type-in traffic may be worth the money, but if you are working without investors (and even if you have some additional capital), spending $15,000 for the right name might not be an option.
Dennis Forbes posted some “Interesting Facts about Domain Names” on his blog. His stats include the information how many 2, 3, 4 and 5 letter sequences are available. Turns out that if you try going for the short names, combinations with letters and numbers seem to be your best bet in order to find one that is still available.
His article reminded me of Paul Graham’s “Startup Names“, which basically states that it’s “uncool” to have a name that was bought of “squatters” (I’d rather call them speculators). This probably depends on your target audience. I am not quite convinced that this applies to your average Joe web-surfer.
As stated above, I think any one could use the traffic and credibility that a generic name might bring along can be an asset for any business, the question is just if the business is at a stage were it can afford the name. So in the beginning a fantasy name can just be good enough, but it might take more effort to get the buzz started.

[Thanks Idan]

WIPO Disputes: Domains are likely to go to complainant

admin — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 20:55:57 +0000

Yahoo! News write about a UN report about the rise in ‘cybersquatting’. Now if only they specified who is the cybersquatter here, the original domain holders or the complainants

The U.N. copyright agency on Wednesday reported a 20 percent jump in “cybersquatting” complaints last year, coming mainly from top tech firms, trendy fashion brands, Hollywood stars and sports personalities. [...]

The agency registered 1,456 complaints for cybersquatting or abusive registration of trademarks as Internet domain names and the practice appears to be on the rise, said Francis Gurry, deputy director general of the World Intellectual Property Organization, or WIPO.[...]

In total, WIPO has received over 8,000 complaints, nearly half of which were filed by people or companies based in the United States. U.S. firms and individuals were also the targets of nearly half of all complaints. [...]

Since 1999, WIPO has decided in favor of the complainant in 84 percent of all cases.

So the complainant wins in most cases. Where are the statistics that show that the complainant are mostly large corporations and the targets of complaints often were individuals?

More facts from the press release:

Most disputes concern international domains, with .com again representing over 80% of names involved. However, in 2005 the Center also dealt with 44 cases involving country code top-level domains (ccTLDs). [...]

The Centers new report, “New Generic Top-Level Domains: Intellectual Property Considerations”, recommends the introduction of a uniform preventive intellectual property protection mechanism in all new gTLDs, in order to complement the curative relief provided by the UDRP. The Report is available at http://arbiter.wipo.int/domains/reports/newgtld-ip.

Yahoo! News: U.N. Reports Rise in Cybersquatting – Yahoo! News
Press Release: WIPO responds to significant cybersquatting activity in 2005

Godaddy discovers a new revenue source: (suspected) Spammers

admin — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 19:53:57 +0000

8008135 reports that GoDaddy has just uncovered another revenue source. According to his report, he created a niche web-directory and send an offer for free listings to a small discussion group he is part of. Apparently someone reported it as spam.
And if GoDaddy receives a spam report they consider credible, they will charge you a $199 non-refundable spam abuse fee. If you don’t pay that fee, they cancel your services, which apparently includes ‘redirecting’ your domain name. Which I would imagine includes redirecting it to a parking page.

Isn’t GoDaddy also the registrar that charges a $29.00 fee when they receive a domain name dispute?

Update:

Turns out that I should have read on, as the story continued: There is no fee to be paid since the complaint volume ‘appears to have tapered off’. GoDaddy now considers the case closed. A day ago they were still planning on charging $199 USD for it, but now it’s considered closed.